


All The Days Of My Life

by rilla



Series: All The Days Of My Life [1]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Future Fic, Las Vegas, M/M, Marriage, Touring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-11
Updated: 2015-04-11
Packaged: 2018-03-22 06:29:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 41,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3718558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rilla/pseuds/rilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 2016. At the end of the band's last tour, Zayn and Harry get married in Vegas. It's not the worst thing that's ever happened to them, but it certainly comes close. Half fix-it fic, half woke up married.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All The Days Of My Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mostlycruel (vifargent)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vifargent/gifts).



> I've always wanted to write a woke up married AU, so thank you for giving me the chance to do that! So many thanks to [Whatsoever](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Whatsoever/pseuds/Whatsoever), who listened patiently to my incessant whining and screaming over this fic and encouraged me and read it for me, and [velvet_tuberose](http://archiveofourown.org/users/velvet_tuberose/pseuds/velvet_tuberose), who did a completely brilliant beta job on it. Any mistakes are mine and not theirs. This story was tricky to write, as it was intended to be canon future fic, and obviously March was the month of doom for 1D fans, so this is now AU.

“This is Louis’s fault,” Zayn tells Harry, not for the first time. 

Everything is usually Louis’s fault. The busted toilet in the tour bus from when Louis decided to put firecrackers down it. The way that everyone eyes them all with great trepidation, as though they’re about to leapfrog away and catapult off the walls, or start throwing things abruptly at people’s heads. The fact that none of their mic stands really work because Louis broke them all, show by show. Zayn desperately hopes that this is as well.

“How is it Louis’s fault?” Harry asks, which is a fair question. He removes his left hand from the tangle of bedclothes surrounding it, and holds it up to the light. The ring on his fourth finger is dull silver, a star caught inside a moon. Zayn’s had it for years and it’s bizarre to see someone else wearing it. He feels sick. “I don’t think it is Louis’s fault,” Harry continues on, sounding implacable and terrible. “I think it might be ours.”

“I think you’re talking shit,” Zayn points out as politely as he can. Admittedly, it’s not all that polite. His stomach is whirling, ominously and audibly. “We would never—” He huffs out a sigh. “We can’t be,” he says, after a moment. Harry looks at him, barely moving his head, green eyes going from his own hand to Zayn’s face. He’s too calm, and he doesn’t look hungover at all. Zayn’s going to have to kill him. “I wouldn’t marry _you_ ,” he explains.

“Excuse me,” Harry says, looking mortally offended. “I’d be a wonderful husband.”

“I didn’t say you wouldn’t be!” Zayn says, doing his best not to explode. 

“It was implied,” Harry mutters, with the audacity to look hurt. “Stop doing that face!”

“I’m not doing a face!”

“You are! You’re doing this face—” Harry screws up his eyes and does what Zayn has to admit is a dead-on impression of him.

“Oh, fuck off,” he says, with great maturity.

“This is a fine way to start a marriage,” Harry says grumpily at the duvet.

Zayn still has way too much whisky rolling around in his system for this conversation. “It’s not a marriage.”

“We got married,” Harry says. “Technically, we’re in a marriage.”

“Your technicalities can kiss my arse,” Zayn tells him. His head’s all foggy. He isn’t up for any of Harry’s technicalities, now or ever.

Harry quirks an eyebrow at him, which makes Zayn abruptly remember that last night Harry actually did kiss his arse, and considerably more beside that. “Ugh,” he says. “I want a divorce.”

“You’re the envy of girls around the world,” Harry tells him, looking pleased with himself.

“So are you,” Zayn points out.

“You were engaged for ages so they’re probably not that bothered. They got used to the idea.”

Zayn frowns at him, and Harry looks apologetic. They always do, if someone brings up Perrie by mistake. She’s a sore subject; it still hurts Zayn deep down in his chest when he thinks about her and the mistakes they both made. He thought about it after they broke up, did some deep and real soul searching about the problems they had and the many ways in which they were his fault, and decided that next time he’d be more careful and a better boyfriend. He’d make some girl really happy. And now he’s accidentally married to Harry Styles so all his good resolutions have basically gone to shit. 

“How did it even happen?” he asks Harry, a bit desperate. “The others went for drinks and we were upstairs—” 

“You were in your room,” Harry puts in.

“Yeah, and then you knocked on my door.”

“I was lonely.”

“You didn’t say that last night,” Zayn says. He thinks he’ll always be amazed by the way that Harry just says what he’s feeling, without any shame at all. 

“Well, I was,” Harry says. “And I couldn’t find anyone else so you had to do.”

“And then we got drunk,” Zayn says. He still can’t see the leap from getting drunk to getting married. He feels like alcohol should exacerbate feelings that are already there, rather than giving you brand new ones that make you like your most irritating bandmate enough to pledge your life to him. Admittedly, maybe they aren’t entirely brand new because there were months – years, really, if Zayn’s honest and doesn’t count the breaks between tours – where he did kind of like Harry, but those are well and truly gone. And it felt fucking stupid and one sided anyway, when Harry kept pissing off to California and making best friends with Alexa Chung and hanging out with Rod Stewart and having sex with Taylor Swift. And Zayn had Perrie anyway and for a while he’d wanted so badly to make it work with her, so thinking about Harry and wondering ‘What if’ and ‘Maybe one day’ had been fairly redundant. 

He’d tried painfully hard not to think about that sort of thing years ago, when he’d woken up beside Harry more mornings than not, and the world had suddenly seemed brighter and full of more possibilities than he’d ever really considered before. He’s been with other men, a couple of boys he kissed when he was fifteen, a few blurry encounters since then, generally with Alberto and Preston turning a blind eye and handing out non-disclosure agreement forms afterwards, a couple of things that their PR team had to shut down abruptly before they made it into the papers, but nothing else as lengthy. Nothing else that meant as much to him, although it makes him feel like shit to admit it to himself. But Zayn’s pretty sure that everyone has someone they’ve got an awkward past with. He thinks he moved on from it pretty well. These days it’s all a skilful tightrope balancing act of not ever making eye contact with Harry and, occasionally, reassuring himself that Harry still wants him. That’s the part of his personality that he doesn’t particularly like, the part that makes him look at Harry’s mouth for a moment too long and watching his lips part helplessly as though he’s asking a silent question that Zayn will never answer.

Seems like he might have slipped up there, what with the ‘I do’s. That seems like a pretty definitive response.

“Very drunk,” Harry confirms, and pulls the sort of sweet, funny face that Zayn remembers from when they were younger. “That was fun. We haven’t done that in a while.”

“You’re busy doing it with other people, mostly,” Zayn says.

Harry shrugs. “And you sit in your room smoking with Louis,” he says lightly. “We all have our hobbies.”

 _Ouch_ , Zayn wants to say, but instead he just shrugs. Standing in the middle of his hotel room in his hastily pulled on boxers with Harry tangled in his sheets is getting increasingly more uncomfortable each minute that goes by. “Whatever,” he mutters. “Has this got out?”

Harry rolls over to grab his phone from the bedside table, treating Zayn to an alarmingly sudden glimpse of his bum, which is a force to be reckoned with. He looks frantically at the ceiling as Harry settles back down again and says, “Don’t think so,” as he scrolls through the phone. “Ha, look,” he says, and tosses it at Zayn. “Gem sent me a picture of a puppy.”

If it was a picture of anything other than a puppy, Zayn would throw the phone back at Harry’s face. As it is, he loves puppies more than he loves people, so it’s fine. He takes a look at the puppy – it’s golden and fluffy – and says, “It’s a very nice puppy,” before chucking it back onto the bed. “So we could just – we could just pretend this never happened.”

Harry looks at him as though he thinks Zayn is the sweetest of idiots. “We could,” he says. “You might want to give me my ring back first, though.”

Zayn wears rings pretty much every day. He likes the look of them on his hands, the surprising delicacy of some of them, the way others could probably double up as knuckle dusters that could win him the kind of fight he isn’t allowed to be in any more. He hadn’t noticed the extra weight on his fourth finger. He used to have an engagement ring that he wore months ago – only sometimes, not every day. Just when he needed to have Perrie with him for a few hours. He can’t remember where he put that ring down. In the bathroom cupboard at home maybe, or on the kitchen counter. He bets that his mum’s picked it up and put it somewhere safe where he’ll never find it again. That’s probably for the best. He looks down at his left hand and the new ring on his fourth finger. It’s Harry’s, the thick silver one that says PEACE across it. “Shit,” he says, and starts twisting it off.

“You can borrow it,” Harry says, suddenly, “if you want. Just for a bit.”

“What?”

Harry shrugs, looking as though he’s a snail who’s about to curl in on himself. For a moment Zayn feels sorrier for him than he thinks any other human being could ever be for Harry Styles. He looks young: barely stubbled, faintly spotty forehead, sleepy green eyes. The way that Zayn remembers him being, instead of the way that they’ve been with each other for years now.

“Okay,” Zayn tells him, softly. “Okay. For now I’ll keep it.”

*

He takes a shower and sucks down three small toothbrush glasses of water to combat the hungover dryness lingering on his tongue, and somehow when he comes out of the bathroom Harry’s still there. He’s pulled on his jeans now and he’s standing at the window, long lean body against the window frame, one hand above his head, pressed idly against the glass. “It’s not as impressive by day, is it?” he asks.

“What, Vegas as a whole? That’s a bit harsh,” Zayn says. He joins Harry at the window. The sky’s a deep blue and the sun is blazing down, and far away in the distance he can see the desert. It’s so far away from London that it makes his teeth ache with how much he suddenly wants to go home and to escape from everything they have to do. Thank God the end of the tour is coming. Thank God for their hiatus. Vegas is even further away from Bradford than it is from London, but maybe the weirdest thing so far about the fame thing is going back there and feeling as though he’s left it behind. He’s starting to think that maybe the idea of home is just a construct, but he doesn’t want to not have one at all. “Maybe not,” he admits. 

Harry hmms and taps his fingertips on the glass, still frowning out at the world, and then he turns to Zayn. “So what are we going to do about this?”

Zayn’s stomach flips. The reality of it hasn’t quite settled in yet, the rings on their fingers presumably representing the feelings that have lingered over the last couple of years between them, the echo of being eighteen and kissing Harry in the flat he used to share with Louis, breaking away from him and smiling secret smiles at each other that said _I know you_. He doesn’t know him any more. He doesn’t understand the process that brought them here. He doesn’t know how they’re going to get out of it either. “No one has to know,” he says.

“Right,” Harry says, sounding unconvinced.

“Lawyers,” Zayn says, “obviously.”

“I want to tell Liam,” Harry says, with great certainty. “He’ll know what to do.”

“Liam never knows what to do,” Zayn says.

“He does sometimes,” Harry says, sounding painstakingly fair in that way that’s always made Zayn want to push him off a cliff. “We should tell him and then maybe – maybe he can ring the lawyers for us, and…”

“We can get an annulment,” Zayn says.

“Actually, I think we had too much sex for that,” Harry says.

There’s an uncomfortable silence. Zayn thinks of the dip of Harry’s collarbone and the birds etched below it and the way the ferns on his hips dip downwards like they’re pointing towards his cock, which is thick and long and uncut. Zayn knows it like the back of his hand, thanks to hotel rooms in Miami, Oslo, Ottawa, Glasgow, even his own spare room once upon a time, Perrie making a meringue downstairs as Harry wrestled him down onto the bed and gave him a messy blowjob. That was the summer before they got engaged. Before he and Harry broke it off, whatever they were doing – until last night, of course. He thinks of Harry’s skin gleaming like he had the sun inside him, the faint taste of salt and the low chemical tang of cologne on his chest, his wrists – his thighs, Zayn remembers discovering. Last night was a lot.

“Probably,” he agrees belatedly. 

Harry looks at him and throws him half a smile. Zayn doesn’t remember when he stopped being able to understand what Harry’s expressions meant, the half-hidden looks in his eyes, storms brewing, fire and brimstone, but it happened somewhere along the way. Harry says, deceptively light: “Let’s find the others. Decide what to do,” and Zayn nods.

*

As it turns out, they’re no help whatsoever. Zayn sags despondently in a desk chair as Harry says “So, a really funny thing happened yesterday. As it turns out, we ended up getting married,” in a bright voice to Liam, Louis and Niall.

There’s a stunned silence and then Louis starts laughing. “Classic Styles,” he says, through guffaws. Liam looks as though he’s very certain someone’s made a joke he’s just missed that he’s waiting politely to understand, and Niall’s eyes are narrowed as he looks between the pair of them. Zayn focuses his attention on a bit of droopy brocade on the side of his chair, and starts picking at it.

“Rude,” Harry says reprimandingly. 

“Are you joking?” Liam says. “Very funny, lads. Ha, ha. Let’s move on.” He looks a bit desperate.

“They’re not joking at all,” Niall says, sounding sharper than usual. “What’s wrong with you?” he asks, which feels more directed at just Zayn than he thinks it should be. He throws Niall a frown and Niall stares menacingly back at him.

“Oh God,” Liam says, sounding panicked. “This is like Britney Spears!” 

“Britney’s great, though, isn’t she. And from what I’ve heard she’s doing really well now. Fair play to her,” Harry says to absolutely no one.

“She was great until she got married in Vegas,” Liam says. “Then she shaved her head and went mental.”

“Those two things weren’t necessarily connected,” Harry says.

Liam presses his hand against his forehead, like he’s in the middle of getting a particularly excruciating headache.

Louis somehow manages to stop laughing, and says, “What in the name of fuck are you going to do about it?”

“We’ll probably get divorced,” Harry says, glancing at Zayn.

Louis says, “ _Probably_?” as if it’s a hairball he’s in the middle of trying to hack up.

“Definitely,” Zayn clarifies.

Harry looks slightly put out.

“Why’d you do it, anyway?” Niall asks.

“It’s a bit of a blur,” Zayn mumbles. It really is; he remembers the drinks, and the laughing, and the getting closer to each other than they had in months – years, in fact. Harry’s slow lazy smile and the shadow of his hair falling across his face, the way he managed to smell slightly like the ocean despite being nowhere near it, the way he’d made Zayn want to lean in to listen to every drawled word he said. That quality he’s always had that Zayn’s been trying to avoid for so long, whatever it is that’s always separated Harry off from the rest of them. He remembers that, and he faintly remembers apologies too. He remembers the casino, he thinks, and the bar and more drinks and a gift shop, and promises and kissing, just like they always did, the foregone conclusion with them whenever they got drunk together. Getting home drunk from bars on tour when Zayn was nineteen and laughing and kissing sloppily and grinding down onto each other, on their beds and in the taxi even, as Liam said “For God’s sake!” from the front seat.

He can feel the weight of Harry’s eyes on him, but he doesn’t look up. “It is a blur,” Harry confirms, softer. “It was stupid. I don’t know why we did it.”

*

They talk to their managers, who talk to their publicists, who brace themselves for a siege that might never come. Zayn hides away in his room, because it seems to make the most sense. He smokes on the balcony, his feet on the wooden railing, his phone in his hand. Married to Harry. Married to _Harry_ , of all people. He could see himself getting drunk and marrying Louis, because it’s exactly the sort of stupid thing they’d do together, but Harry makes no sense; it’s not like Niall, who makes everyone else’s lives better by simply existing, or Liam, who’s like a ridiculous puppy, loyal to a fault, thoughtful and surprisingly wise, mostly when he doesn’t mean to be. Harry is frustrating, and Zayn has never understood him, and often he thinks that he never will. Most of the time he doesn’t even think he wants to, that the band will be over pretty soon and then it won’t matter that they don’t really talk, because they won’t have to pretend that they do. He can imagine going to the pub with Niall, or sitting out in the garden having a joint with Louis, or sneaking into Forbidden Planet with Liam, but he has no idea what the fuck he’d do with Harry. Make candles? Buy interesting hats? Compose artistic Instagram shots? It’s just not Zayn’s scene. Harry himself is just – he’s not Zayn’s scene at all.

People knock on his door and he opens it so they don’t think he’s dead and has tight-lipped three word conversations before closing the door again. They don’t have a show today, which is nice. Once upon a time, Perrie might have flown out for a few days in Vegas during a break like this. Sophia is here for Liam, splashing around in the pool outside with Lou and Lux and going out for bubble tea and taking Liam to see Cirque du Soleil. Zayn doesn’t want to go to that, thanks. He thinks there are much better ways to raise your heartrate than sitting in a sweaty theatre as people wearing neon-coloured Lycra throw themselves around and almost die.

Louis comes for a smoke with him, and Niall talks some random shit before Zayn manages to coax him gently out, and Liam makes his concerned eyebrows face, and eventually Zayn is left alone to do – he doesn’t know what. These days he never does. Sometimes minutes and hours are just things to be got through.

So he orders a burger and chips and then reorders it when it comes with bacon, because obviously he can’t eat that, and he picks out the unnecessary salad – salad is dreadful – and eats the meat and cheese and bread, and then he sits around feeling nauseated. He looks down at the new ring on his hand and thinks, _I’m married to Harry Styles_. It doesn’t make sense. Once this whole blurry blistering period of time is over it probably still won’t.

*

They have a show to do the day afterwards, because of course they do. They go to the venue for soundcheck, and Niall shouts into the wall of hot, flat air to hear his voice reverberate through the empty seats. Harry’s off on his own even more than usual, but he’s being his usual obsequiously nice self: shaking hands with all the random people that work there, grinning with Cal, trying and failing to persuade Lou to let him practise karate on her. Across the stage Zayn can see his ring glinting silver on Harry’s hand. 

Louis comes up to him and bumps his shoulder against Zayn’s. “This is a bit mental, isn’t it?” he says.

Zayn grunts in acquiescence.

Louis is looking at him steadily, in that annoyingly perceptive way he has sometimes. He’s all stupid comments most of the time, idiotic games that sometimes Zayn loves to join in and that sometimes he avoids like the plague, but at the worst possible times he always remembers that Louis actually has a frighteningly good understanding of human nature and possibly, Zayn occasionally thinks, the ability to mindread. “You all right?” he says, and adds, “You don’t seem all right.”

“Cheers very much,” Zayn says, and throws a glance across the stage to Harry, who’s jumping round in circles and breathlessly singing “Baby, look what you’ve done to me,” over and over again.

“You have to admit,” Louis says, “it was a strange thing to happen.”

“Perfectly natural,” Zayn says. “Heightened emotions. Just broke up with Perrie. Band’s over soon. He’s got a nice—”

“All right, all right, you can stop right there,” Louis says, making a face.

“Smile,” Zayn adds, innocently.

Louis snorts out a laugh. “Lawyers are on it, right?”

“Don’t know,” Zayn says. “Probably.”

“What I like about you,” Louis says, “is your get up and go attitude.”

Zayn shoves him lightly and Louis flings himself onto the floor. “I’m injured!” he shouts, sounding aggrieved, and Liam throws himself about twenty feet downstage to land on top of him. “Jesus fucking Christ,” Louis says in a muffled voice as Niall resignedly jumps on top of Liam. Harry sees them from across the stage and makes a running leap, and Zayn just – he thinks that maybe he should join in, probably. He should be part of it, or try to be at least. But he can see the blue sky, he can be underneath it if he just walks forward down the runway, if he leaves the others behind in their wriggling pile of limbs. He takes a step, and then another, and then a few more, and before he knows it he’s standing in the sun, which is heavy and thick and oddly dusty. Maybe that’s psychosomatic, he has no idea. Maybe it’s something left over from looking at the dusty mountains around as they landed and then from his hotel room, memories of the countless old CSI episodes that Doniya used to watch. He thinks with a little alarm, _I can’t breathe_ , and fumbles for one of the bottles of water already on the side of the stage for the gig later. He drags half of it down his throat quickly, a few drips missing his mouth and trickling down his neck onto the neckline of his t-shirt. He wipes them with the back of his arm, making the ink shine in the sunlight.

He looks back at his boys and hears Louis make a loud, laughing noise of protest. He sees a flash of Niall’s bright blond hair and Liam’s red t-shirt and Harry’s legs, waving round like a spider on top of everything else. His stomach drops and lodges itself somewhere around his feet. Married. For the love of God, _married_. He doesn’t know how he’s going to spend the rest of his life not telling his mum, but he’s clearly going to have to. But it’s a onetime mistake, nothing more than that. Just Vegas, casting its crazy spell. He looks down at Harry’s PEACE ring on his hand and twists it on his finger, feeling the smooth warm metal on this hot day, not too tight, not too imprisoning. Just a thing that’s happened, not dreadful, not brilliant. Just a thing. He puts the water bottle back on the floor and turns to the pile of bandmates at the head of the stage. He considers running up there like Liam would, but that isn’t really his style. Instead he walks back up to them, lodges himself firmly on Harry’s back and lifts his feet up so his full weight is on the others. 

“I’M GOING TO BE SICK,” Louis shouts from the bottom. “I’M GOING TO BE SICK ON NIALL.”

“Tough luck,” Zayn says. “It’s been a very traumatic couple of days for me and Harry. We need a good laugh.” The words tremble in the air and hold, for a moment. Harry lifts his head and twists and looks at Zayn, an eyebrow raised, like he’s asking _We’re good_? and Zayn half-nods back at him. _Yeah,_ he says. He hopes they are, anyway.

*

The siege doesn’t come until the next day, after they’ve played their second Vegas date and they’re in the cars on the way to their jets. Liam is a little quieter than usual as he adjusts to Sophia leaving for home, and Louis looks half asleep, but Niall’s tapping away on his phone and reading out tweets sent during the show. “Harry looked at me and I literally shit my pants,” he announces.

“We’ve all been there,” Louis says. “Harry Styles related incontinence is no joke. It’s not the best superpower to have, is it, Harold?”

“There are worse,” Harry says mildly. 

“Zayn,” Niall reads out, “I want you to fill my ass with your daddy juices.”

“Too far,” Liam says firmly. “That’s taking the actual biscuit.”

Zayn scrunches up his face in mild disgust. “I don’t think I’m going to do that,” he says.

“Unless it was Harry who sent the tweet,” says Louis, the bastard.

“It was,” Harry says, deeply serious. “It was me. Please, Zayn, fill me up.”

Zayn can feel himself flushing. He shifts in his seat, pressing his forehead against the window and enjoying the cool glass. He likes having a look through Twitter and Tumblr sometimes, likes seeing what people are saying and if they like what he’s wearing and how his hair looks, and if the fans have done any good art. Sometimes they’re so talented that he gets jealous, but most of the time he’s just grateful that they like him this much. He scrolls past the fanfiction, because the fans are entitled to do what they want but he once saw something about him felching Niall. Then he proceeded to have a really awkward dream about it that night and was unable to make eye contact with Niall for two days, and Zayn doesn’t really want that to happen again. He finds a drawing of himself half-frowning into the distance, lights glittering around his head like stars from the crowds behind him. It’s naturalistic, beautifully detailed, his hair swooping over his forehead, making him look way more handsome than he really is, and he takes a screencap of it before tweeting it out with ‘aha ! Sick ! So much talent ! X x’ next to it. ‘OMG ZAYN!!!’ says someone after less than a second. ‘SPUNK ON MY TITS’, says someone else, which seems inappropriate. 

He taps open the blog, finds the fan art tag and looks idly through it. Some of it is detailed and natural, Niall in white pencil on a black background, Louis with his jaw set like a superhero, and some of it is an inside joke that he clearly doesn’t really understand, which is odd considering it’s about him and four of his mates. Cartoons of the five of them dressed in dinosaur costumes, as astronauts, Louis dressed as a fox and Liam with puppy ears and a tail, these little chubby figures with big blocky heads. Himself with pointed ears and his lips pulled back to reveal sharp white teeth like a wolf’s. He isn’t sure if he likes that much.

He scrolls down more, only half paying attention because Niall and Louis are having an increasingly more rambunctious conversation about the Rovers and it’s getting very loud and potentially violent, and then he sees it – a drawing of him and Harry, in the same naturalistic style as the first picture he saw. It’s not completely coloured, his skin almost the same as Harry’s, their tattoos mostly scribbles, but it’s so – Christ. The lines of it, they’re evocative and sexy and – fuck. His dick’s getting interested. He takes a breath and squints out of the window at the night, angling his phone so no one else can see it before looking down again. Him, buried between Harry’s legs, hands on his thighs, pushing them wider. Harry spread out beneath him, jaw dragged open, his hair messy and his eyes glazed. In something Zayn once read for GCSE English he remembers the word ‘wanton’. That’s what Harry is in this picture: bare, unashamed, dying for it because Zayn’s there between his legs, one hand fisting his dick, his mouth pressed up against his arse. And he’s done it before. He’s seen Harry like this, gasping and begging to come, flushed and taut with the desperation to hold still so Zayn’ll finish the job off. God, he misses this. God, he wants this.

Unobtrusively, he takes a screencap of the picture and Whatapps it to Harry.

A second passes, and then another, and then Harry sucks in a surprised breath on the other side of the car. Zayn keeps his eyes on the retreating lights of the city outside, and just as they pull up to the airfield Liam, eyes on his phone, says, “Oh, shit.”

There are fans waiting outside, because there always sodding are. Zayn knows they give the band their livelihood, but sometimes he does sort of wish they’d all fuck off. He pulls his hood up and hops out of the car just as Louis says, “Don’t!”

“What?” Zayn asks, turning back to the car.

“Come on, boys.” Preston appears out of nowhere and starts trying to shepherd Zayn towards one of the planes, but Zayn avoids him with the immense dodging skills of a rabid stalker fan.

“What are you talking about? What’s wrong?” he asks, sticking his head back into the car, the fans screaming behind them, and then he makes out someone shouting, “Zarry is real! Are you married?”

“Oh my God,” he says into the car. He feels like his colon’s about to fall out of his arse. “Did they just—”

“It’s out,” Liam intones solemnly, waving his phone. Niall laughs nervously but Louis doesn’t, staring at Zayn with wide blue eyes. Louis being serious for once is how Zayn knows it isn’t a joke. That’s how he knows this shit is for real. That’s how he knows that they’re completely fucked. He throws a glance over his shoulder at the girls standing behind the wire fence. He can never tell if the band or the fans are the caged animals in this weird zoo life but he feels like you could make a good case for either. He looks at Harry finally. His face is still and set, waxen in the dark, as he stares back at Zayn. He feels a strange clarity, like he’s almost glad that he has to meet this challenge and that there’s something else happening in his life. He can’t just push this away into someone else’s hands, like when Perrie decorated his house and their bedroom ended up pale purple with a silky duvet cover and it was all wrong and not the way he wanted it to be at all. This is for him and Harry to decide. They’re fucking married. It’s the biggest mistake Zayn’s ever made in his life, and the most exciting one too. He throws the boys a wild smile before ripping himself away from the car and hurtling towards the plane, footsteps slapping on the tarmac and then thudding up the metal stairs, adrenaline surging through his body and bubbling up his throat, and he doesn’t know if it’s trying to choke him into or out of life.

*

All five of them crowd onto one jet for once, squeezing into four seats around a table. Liam’s still frowning at his phone, scrolling thoughtfully up and down, before finally surmising, “Right, TMZ got the certificate and posted it. Went viral from there.” He places his phone screen-down on the table. “I think we should decide what to do.”

“Shouldn’t Harry and Zayn decide what to do?” Niall asks.

“They’re not allowed to make any decisions ever again,” Louis says, with great severity.

“Heeeey,” Harry says.

“He’s got a point,” Zayn mumbles. He feels like he’s sweating more than usual. It’s out there, it’s out there, oh Jesus, people know, it’s— “Harry,” he says, with more urgency, “our mums.”

Harry’s eyes suddenly bulge. “What?”

“Our _mums_. I know it’s night at home but they’re going to hear about it really soon.” He thinks of Doniya getting up for work and looking at her phone and seeing a million tweet notifications and missed calls and texts, all informing her that her stupid brother has accidentally married one of his bandmates. Running up to their parents’ room, asking if they think it’s real, if they’re together, really married. In love. He’s tempted to start looking for a sick bag. He doesn’t want to have to tell his family anything, but it’s better than them finding out for themselves. 

“Shitting hell,” Harry mutters, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Why did we _do_ this?”

“I’ve been asking myself that too,” Louis snits, and promptly shuts up when Zayn shoots him a dark look.

“Because we thought it’d be a laugh,” Zayn says, after a moment, lying through his teeth. “We just thought it’d be funny!”

“It’s not, though, really, is it,” Niall says.

Louis is nodding, as though he’s finally starting to understand. In fairness, Louis has probably done worse things in the name of a laugh than marrying one of his friends. Not that that was the real reason, and not that Zayn and Harry are even friends, really, these days. _The important thing about getting married,_ his mum once told him, _is to marry your best friend._ Fat chance. Danny and Ant are off doing their own thing to the extent that Zayn feels a bit weird calling them his mates at all these days, let alone his best friends, and God love Shahid, but Zayn’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to suck his dick.

The plane starts going down the runway. Liam taps a pen on the table thoughtfully. Zayn has no idea at all where it came from, but Liam’s good like that. He’s always got a pen or a spare charger or a condom if Zayn wants to have random sex with someone. “So,” Liam says. “We’ve got an hour and fifteen minutes until we land. Phones off, lads. We’re going to make a plan.”

*

They plan, without their PR team giving them any advice. They plan, without their management’s input. They plan, just the five of them, thinking about their future together rather than their upcoming end for the first time in years. Liam begins to draw up a list, and Harry finds a pencil somewhere and starts gently correcting everyone else’s spelling mistakes as they discuss it. After ten minutes Louis huffs at them tiredly and says, “You could just tell everyone it was a prank.”

“Mmm,” Harry says. He sounds unconvinced.

“Mmm?” Zayn asks him.

“Just – it wouldn’t make it sound that great, would it?” Harry says. Zayn hates how slowly he speaks. “Like, ‘Thought we’d get married. Thought it might be a bit of a lol.’”

“A bit of a lol?” Louis asks severely, and then adds what is, to him, a crushing death blow: “You sound like Nick Grimshaw.”

“No one could pay me a higher compliment,” Harry says with great dignity.

“Your husband’s sitting _right there,_ ” Louis says. “He’s probably going wild with jealousy.”

“I’m really not,” Zayn says, doing his best not to look nauseated at the word ‘husband’. “What do you mean, Harry? Why isn’t it a good idea?”

Harry shrugs awkwardly, all squished in next to the window with Liam looking sideways at him like a confused puppy. “Dunno,” he says. “Just – it’s a serious thing, isn’t it, marriage? I know we’re not amazing role models. But this is taking the piss, isn’t it? Makes us sound like pricks who don’t care about anything. I feel like it’s not very _nice_.”

Harry’s obsession with being nice is going to kill Zayn one day. He says, “So what do we do? We tell everyone it was a carefully considered decision?”

“No,” Harry says, looking uncomfortable. “I think we should just – never complain, never explain, right? We don’t owe anyone an explanation for this.”

Zayn hates to admit it, but he thinks he might have a point. “So we just—”

“We don’t confirm it,” Harry says, starting to warm up a bit. “We just go about our lives and we don’t confirm or deny it and we refuse to answer questions about it, and we just…”

“We just get a divorce some time. In a couple of months,” Zayn says. “And we still don’t talk to people about it?”

After his little speech Harry looks like he’s run out of oomph. “Well,” he says, “I suppose so. Yeah.”

Zayn has actually heard worse ideas than that, but maybe that’s because he spends most days with Louis and Liam, who recently invented a game called ‘Corridor Fire Extinguisher Ninja’. He looks at the others and quirks an eyebrow to ask them what they think. Niall half shrugs, Liam nods slowly and Louis’s face softens slightly. “All right,” Zayn says. “Yeah. Fine.”

“People are still going to know you had sex though,” says Niall, wholly irritating voice of reason and sense.

“I don’t care,” Harry says, shrugging a shoulder.

Zayn does care, actually. He cares about paparazzi camping outside Perrie’s house and asking her how she feels about her ex-fiancé’s brand new marriage to Harry Styles. He cares about other men he’s been with over the years drifting out of the woodwork and casually selling their stories to the Sunday Mirror, because he knows he hasn’t been careful enough with NDAs every time. He knows he’s been messy. He cares about his mum and dad and all his relatives, finding out things about him that he should have told them himself. He knows they won’t mind, he knows without a doubt that their love for him won’t waver. They might be pretty pissed off they weren’t invited to his first ever wedding though, and he knows his mum will cry at him about things he never told her because he didn’t feel like he needed to. He knows they’ll see it as dishonesty, when he always saw it as self-preservation and not having to explain himself. He hates having to explain himself.

“Maybe I can be the patron of a LGBT charity,” Harry says, sounding misty. “Stonewall. The Lesbian and Gay Switchboard.”

“Sure,” Liam says, “except you should probably deal with your accidental marriage first.”

Harry looks unconvinced, which is typical of him, and then he shrugs noncommittally. “All right. Maybe.” He looks over at Zayn, tapping his fingers on the table, Zayn’s ring still on his hand. “So we just keep it quiet. This is our thing. We don’t owe anyone any explanations,” he says.

“Except for our mums,” Zayn reminds him.

Harry makes a face. “Except for our mums,” he confirms.

*

Zayn’s mum hits the roof, understandably. She says “You did what?” and then she shouts “Yaser! YASER!” way too close to the phone. Zayn holds it away from his ear for a moment, and then she says, breathless, “You married _Harry_?”

“Yeah,” Zayn mumbles. “It was just – we’d been drinking and there was this whole thing, and—”

“I didn’t even know you still felt that way about each other,” his mum gushes at him, and then shouts “Yaser, where _are you_?”

“Wait,” Zayn says. “What? We never – what?”

“I think he must have already left for the gym. That man!” she says crossly, and then, “I can’t believe I wasn’t there. You have to do something when you’re home. We have to have a family day. You have to renew your vows, you have to—”

Zayn realises, suddenly, that he’s starting to get a headache.

“We were so disappointed when you and Perrie broke up,” his mum goes on, which is news to Zayn, and makes him feel a bit cold and miserable and as though he’s let everyone down for the millionth time. “But this is lovely. He’s such a sweet boy. I mean, he’s no Liam—”

“What?” Zayn says again.

“You know I love Liam,” his mum says, sounding apologetic. “But I know you and Harry have always had your special bond, haven’t you? The way you used to talk about him. I need to look at your old articles and start cutting things out.”

“Please don’t do that,” Zayn says faintly.

“Zayn,” she says, and her voice catches in her throat, “oh, my baby boy. I can’t believe you’re married.”

Tears are starting to sting at his eyes, he dimly recognises, weighing his head down, pushing hard at the top of his noise, his throat clenching up. “Yeah,” he says, half chokes it out, desperate, unable to disappoint her right now. He thinks maybe he’ll save it for later, another day, another week. “Yeah. Me neither.”

*

He’s in bed when he hears Harry knock on his door, the faint tap and then the familiar drum of his fingertips, the way he always used to knock back in the day when they knew each other better and a smile was just a smile instead of a ladder he had to climb to somehow bridge the gaping distance between them. When he opens the door Harry smiles at him, half-apologetic, and holds up a bag. “I brought bagels.”

“Oh,” Zayn says. He’s not all that hungry. “Why?”

“I…” Harry looks down at the bag in his hand, and his mouth tilts up at the corner. “I don’t know. Needed an excuse to come and say hi, I suppose.”

“Since when have we needed excuses?” Zayn asks mostly out of politeness, and Harry raises an eyebrow like he’s saying _Don’t be so stupid_ , which is fair, because for years now they’ve been nothing but excuses.

Zayn steps back, lets him in and closes the door behind him. Harry drops his paper bag onto the dressing table and says, “You’ve got a point though. We’re literally married. I should be able to visit you whenever I like, to take advantage of my marital rights.” 

Zayn blinks at him, and Harry flushes deeply. “No, I just – I was joking. I thought we could talk. I thought…” He scratches the back of his neck, runs his hand through his hair, twists around a bit like he’s a fish on dry land. “If you want me to go I could—”

“No.” Zayn shakes his head quickly. “Nah, you’re all right. You can…” 

“Yeah.” Harry sits down on the edge of Zayn’s bed and starts unzipping his boots. “Can I stay?”

“Er – yeah?” Zayn says. Harry’s looking up at him with big doe eyes. “So we…” He thinks of them when they were younger, those nights sunk long into the past. Flickers from what must be – for fuck’s sake, it all seems completely unreal – their wedding night, getting clearer and more distinct the more he focuses on them. Thinks of Harry’s hands on his thighs, long fingers, licking him out and spreading him open, thinks of Harry sinking into him, more satisfying than anything else in years. Maybe those memories are worth TMZ finding out about their stupid marriage certificate.

“We what?” Harry says, the words low and soft, from deep in his chest. “What do you want?”

Zayn moves over to him, presses himself between Harry’s knees, suddenly painfully aware that Harry’s fully clothed and he’s just in his pants, that he’s skinny as fuck and Harry’s this half-Californian mentalist who only sleeps with models. Zayn’s always liked girls with a bit of normal about them – the way Perrie totally lost control of what her face was doing every time she found something properly funny, the way she had the most ridiculous bedhead of all time, the way she always put her feet in his lap when they were watching TV and commanded him imperiously, “Rub them! I do a job where I have to wear heels, you trainer-wearing shitbag!”. Harry’s never been like that so much. He likes the catalogues, the gloss, the surrealism. But he’s looking up at Zayn like he’s just hung the moon in the sky anyway, he’s curving his hands over his hips, his touch so gentle that it makes Zayn hurt a bit. “Oh,” Harry breathes.

“Hi,” Zayn says. Harry smiles up at him, a brief sweet curve, and then he starts to slowly push Zayn’s pants down off his hips. Zayn’s half hard just from this, flushed and hot, Harry’s face too close, the heat of him and the smell of him with his freshly washed hair and skin, the thought of Harry making himself nice and clean to see Zayn. He likes that. Harry takes his cock in his mouth like he’s giving thanks, thumbs digging into Zayn’s hips, his mouth so hot and tight and sweet. Harry sucks dick like it’s the only thing that could ever make him happy, time after time. Zayn had forgotten that somehow. He touches Harry’s cheekbone and his hair and Harry moans and goes deeper. His eyelashes are dark on his cheeks, his eyes so green when he looks up, his mouth spit-soaked and red when he pulls back and sucks in a breath: “Can I fuck you?” His hands are almost shaking as he drags one of them through his hair. It’s weird to see Harry desperate for something. It’s hard to believe that it’s Zayn he wants. 

“Yeah,” Zayn says, trying so hard to keep some distance. “Yeah, all right.”

Harry shivers out of his clothes and into Zayn’s bed, all gleaming skin and gangly limbs, sits there good as gold as Zayn finds condoms and lube, drops them onto the blankets, straddles him and lets the tip of Harry’s cock press lightly against his hole for a second, making slow movements back and forward, anticipating the sweet ache of the stretch of Harry inside him. Harry makes an unintelligible noise and Zayn bites his lip, trying not to listen to the blood pounding in his ears. This is a horrible, stupid, shitty mistake. Just while they’re married, maybe. Just while they’ve got this ridiculous legally binding thing going on. Maybe they can just – maybe they should do what feels right for now.

He presses fingers into himself and stretches himself out before opening his eyes to find Harry’s gaze on him, his pupils so dilated, eyes like stars, looking gone, so gone. He thinks he should probably feel embarrassed to be like this, so vulnerable, but he just doesn’t feel that way at all. He never has when he’s like this with Harry, the first boy who ever fucked him, the first dick he ever sucked. He sinks down slowly onto Harry’s cock, one hand braced on his chest, gasping at it, how full he feels, the slight ache and twinge, his mouth against Harry’s, faces so close their lashes are almost tangling. Sometimes he thinks he forgets how much he needs this. He can smell mint on Harry’s breath, the just-showered scent of his skin rolling off him. “Fuck,” he says, and Harry holds onto his hips, fucks up into him, slow at first, faster, Zayn shifting until – “Oh, God,” he hears himself say, “yeah. Yeah, yeah,” and Harry says “Yeah?” and Zayn says, “Yeah,” because one thing they’re not known for is their eloquence, the two of them, that’s never been their game. They know how to fuck, how to move against each other, how to catch their mouths and press their hips. Zayn knows how to suck Harry’s cock and let Harry come down his throat, hot and sputtering, but he doesn’t think he’s got a chance in hell of knowing how to make him happy in any other way.

Zayn comes hot and hard over Harry’s flat stomach and he reaches down to smear it over the butterfly tattoo and then, as an afterthought, over Harry’s mouth, pressing a come-smeared finger between his lips as he moves his hips. Harry takes it in eagerly and sucks, his cheeks hollowing. When he comes he buries his face into the side of Zayn’s neck, arms around him, hands clutching and desperate over Zayn’s back, nails scrabbling to hold onto him. The way Harry’s breath catches as he gathers himself afterwards and his shaking hands as he looks into Zayn’s eyes are half a surprise and half not.

*

Zayn wakes up early. He registers golden light trickling into the room through a gap in the curtains, and then the bathroom door cracks open and Harry comes out, looking sleep rumpled and tired and stupidly gorgeous. Zayn blinks at him and raises himself up onto his elbows. “You woke me up.”

“Sorry.” Harry sounds genuinely repentant, flipping his curls back off his face. “Can I get back in bed?”

“Suit yourself.” There’s a strange part of Zayn that won’t let him say yes, although the idea of falling asleep next to someone he knows well feels kind of amazing.

“Right.” Harry stands still, undecided, and then he crawls between the sheets again and twists until he’s comfortable, cold foot pressed against Zayn’s calf. He’s still for a moment and then he reaches out and flings an arm over Zayn’s waist. Zayn doesn’t move, feeling the pressure and the warmth of it. It feels like a heavy coat at the beginning of spring: too stifling and too hot, yet something he’s afraid to fling off just yet. Harry says, into the dark: “So are we going to do this thing, then?”

“What thing?” Zayn asks. “The marriage? You mean forever? Probably not, Harry, to tell you the truth.”

Harry huffs out a laugh. “Rude.”

“Honesty hurts, babe.”

Harry’s quiet before shifting towards him. His soft hair tickles the side of Zayn’s face and then he feels Harry’s mouth on his jawline, kissing just under his ear, stroking Zayn’s hair back off his face with cool fingers. “I liked last night,” he says.

“Me too,” Zayn admits. He can feel himself turning towards Harry, like a flower to the sun.

“We should do it again,” Harry says and kisses his neck again, hand stroking through Zayn’s hair. The rake of his fingers sends hot shivers of want through Zayn’s body and right down to his dick. 

“Maybe,” he agrees. The idea of never getting Harry like this again seems ridiculously implausible. Not rubbing his palms over Harry’s smooth-skinned shoulders, tasting the white pearl of precome on the tip of his cock, pressing his legs back and sinking into him slowly. All these things that were normal for them for a while.

“Good.” Harry touches the underside of Zayn’s chin with his finger and Zayn feels himself obeying the way he always did, turning his face up so that they can kiss, slow and lingering. He wants to sink into Harry and hold himself there for a long, long time. After a moment Harry asks, tracing circles on Zayn’s hip with his other hand, “What do you think about what I said earlier?”

“About not telling people we messed up?” Zayn asks. He feels Harry nod. “Dunno.” He thinks for a moment and wriggles a little, and Harry shifts away. Zayn hates the idea of talking about himself and his feelings to journalists and to people who aren’t their bandmates. He hates having to think about what his feelings actually are, for starters. It’s probably easier not to say anything. Bumble along as best they can before getting a divorce and ending it all. Never looking back. The idea of it makes him feel sick and empty, but it’s all he’s got, it’s the best he can do. “Fine,” he says, his voice quieter and weaker than he’d like. He clears his throat. “Fine then. I don’t know what else to do. So we can do that.”

“Never complain, never explain,” Harry says, like it’s a religious mantra.

“You need to stop quoting Kate Moss,” Zayn tells him.

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” Harry says facetiously.

“That’s a massive lie. Being skinny’s shit. Sometimes Perrie used to be like ‘Oh my God, Zayn! I can’t go on top! What if I break you?’”

Harry’s shoulders start shaking in a silent giggling fit. Zayn shoves him until he rolls away. “Fuck off.”

“As if anyone could break you.” Harry rolls back again, closer this time, situates himself on top of Zayn, one leg between his, weight solidly on Zayn’s chest. “I’d like to see them try.”

Zayn doesn’t know what to say so he just pulls Harry’s head down and bites his bottom lip until he moans. Then he kisses him until he can feel Harry’s hard cock against his leg, thick and heavy. “You’ve got to be on my side though,” Harry manages breathlessly. “You’ve got to – you’ve got to back me up.”

“Sure,” Zayn says, reaching down, wrapping a hand around Harry’s cock, thumbing at the head of it. He wants to rock backwards and open his legs and guide Harry inside himself again. Other than Harry it’s been a long time since he was fucked well. He thinks he’s still slick enough from before. He doesn’t think they need a condom, not really, but then again he’s never been a massive fan of condoms. There’s a reason he spent years fucking groupies in the arse, and it’s not just that anal feels really, really good. But Harry’s dropping his head so their foreheads are pressed together and he’s gasping, hot and desperate, and Zayn just wants to watch him come for now, wants to feel it wet across his stomach, wants to feel Harry shake against him. He wants to undo him, like he used to all the time. He doesn’t know if he can do it from a handjob, but he thinks for now this might be enough. 

“Promise?” Harry stutters out, and Zayn says, “Yeah. Yeah, I promise,” and pulls him down to kiss him again.

*

The next morning they have to talk to Monica, who handles their PR in the States and who already looks like she’s getting a bad migraine when she comes to meet them. Halfway through the conversation, she looks like she’s having a hard time restraining herself from pushing the two of them out of the window. Harry nudges Zayn in the ribs and says “She looks like Liam when she does that, doesn’t she?”

“Actually, yeah,” Zayn agrees. Harry’s knee is touching his under the table. He could get used to it, if he’s honest.

“Boys, please,” Monica says.

“Boys?” Zayn says. “We’re married men, thank you.” Next to him, Harry snickers.

Her eyes narrow. Zayn wonders if she’s ever been as close to quitting her job before as she is right now. “This really isn’t a laughing matter,” she says, reminding Zayn of his year nine maths teacher more than he appreciates. “You got _married_ , the world _knows_ about it, and you’re refusing to comment on it.”

“Well, what would we say?” Zayn says. “Oops, sorry about that, our mistake, please don’t hate us?”

“Don’t worry, we like girls really, this was just a hilarious prank?” Harry carries on. “No. It’s all bollocks. We’re going to do this our way.”

“What exactly _is_ your way?” Monica asks, looking at them as though she would welcome a large crevasse to open beneath their chairs.

Harry looks at Zayn, wide green eyes, messy hair curling down the side of his face and underneath his chin. Zayn thinks of him the previous night, his hair falling down onto Zayn’s face as he shuddered against him. “We just want to get on with it, don’t we?” Harry asks.

Zayn nods in confirmation. “We’ll just be married for a bit. And then one day we’ll get a divorce, and it’ll all blow over.”

Monica huffs out a sigh, and pauses. She’s probably counting to ten under her breath, and finding that ten isn’t a high enough number. Finally she says: “Fine. Have it your way. And are you actually—” She waves a hand at them.

“I have no idea what you’re insinuating,” Harry says, doing an excellent impression of a startled elderly lady.

“Me neither,” Zayn says. He gets his cigarettes out of his pocket and takes one out. Holding it makes him feel a little steadier, even though he isn’t allowed to smoke it inside. He throws Monica a slow, lazy smile and watches a flush spread up her face. “Does it matter?” he asks. “I’m not actually sure it’s any of your business. I thought I was supposed to be the mysterious one. Actually,” he goes on, voice rising ever so slightly because God, he’s hated that tag for years, “actually, I thought that total fucking bullshit about me being mysterious and Harry shagging around all the time was your idea.” Next to him Harry crows with delight, and in that moment Zayn knows they’ve won.

*

“You’re the best,” Harry says delightedly, and kisses him hard in the corridor outside. Zayn kisses him back without thinking, laughing against his mouth when Harry breaks away slightly to fling his arms around Zayn’s waist to attempt to pick him up. The world tilts precariously and Zayn thumps him hard on the back. 

“Put me down, for fuck’s sake!” he grumbles, and Harry does. He doesn’t let him go, though; instead he cups the side of Zayn’s face and kisses him again, sweet and fast like he’s licking icing delicately off a cupcake. “Why are you such a twat?” Zayn asks him, and kisses him back, mostly by accident.

“Born that way.” Harry’s a little out of breath, still smiling, his hair all tangled and stupid. “I liked the way you explained our strategy in there.”

Zayn feels himself smirk. “Strategising gets you hard? All right, Harold, I’ll remember that for next time.” 

Harry cocks his head to the side, like a bird attempting to learn English. “Next time?” he says.

Zayn swallows hard, his stomach doing something unwelcome and irritating. “Fuck off,” he says.

“All right.” Harry’s smiling like he’s extremely pleased with himself. “I hope you talk dirty to me like that ‘next time’.”

Zayn shoves him and Harry stumbles so much in his stupid cowboy boots that Zayn has to reach over and right him again. He huffs out a sigh because Harry is a ridiculous excuse for a human being, and says, “So what do you actually want to do?”

“Maybe we don’t have to do anything,” Harry ponders. “Maybe it’ll magically resolve itself.”

“Maybe,” Zayn says, without much hope. They reach the end of the corridor where the lifts are, and he presses the button to call it.

Harry drapes himself against the wall in a way that shouldn’t be comfortable, but that somehow looks it anyway. “What did your mum say?”

Zayn shrugs. “She was pleased. Upset you weren’t Liam, though. Yours?”

“Cried a lot. Yours was pleased? Really?” He looks like an overeager puppy.

“I think she thought I was a bit – you know. A bit miserable, after Pez,” Zayn admits. The lift comes and they step inside it. 

Harry leans against his shoulder briefly before reaching out to press their floor number. “We all did,” he says. If it’s supposed to be comforting, it’s not working.

“Well, I was a bit sad, I suppose,” Zayn says. He still feels blank with shock when he remembers that he’s not getting married any more, and that he isn’t supposed to be in love any more either. Even when they weren’t seeing each other much, when he knew that Perrie had someone else for a week or so in London as he was getting off with random girls in Sydney, it was reassuring, knowing that there was somewhere in his heart that he could retreat to when he needed it. Not having that any more makes him feel hollowed out inside, as though he spends half of his life unconsciously searching for something that no longer exists.

“You were allowed to be sad,” Harry says. “You loved her a lot.” 

“Hmm,” Zayn says, as the lift dings to a halt and the doors open. Something he’s noticed distinctly is that Harry’s a lot nicer about Perrie now that she and Zayn have broken up. “Have we got a show later?”

“Soundcheck in an hour,” Harry confirms. 

“Right then.” Zayn takes a step back and flicks Harry in the centre of the forehead. “See you then.” He jogs off down the hallway towards his room, not looking back. He doesn’t want to know whether or not Harry’s watching him.

*

It’s a weird show. They always go by in a blur but this one’s especially disconcerting, given that everyone there knows that Zayn just accidentally married Harry. He makes an effort to keep his head down and not make any eye contact. He lets his eyes glide over the posters instead of reading any of them and does his best not to listen to any specific words that the crowd’s saying. Sometimes he feels like the sea of people stretches on infinitely, as though the lights glowing throughout them mean something he can’t begin to comprehend, lighting the way to somewhere completely foreign and terrifying. Saying stuff like that aloud always makes Louis tut at him in concern before rolling him a joint, and Zayn’s trying hard to stay sober at the moment so he just keeps his mouth shut and gets on with the show. He nails his solos, makes faces at Niall and Liam and Louis, and avoids Harry as much as he can because he’s afraid that might get awkward. He’s afraid of stepping off some sort of precipice. Still, not talking to Harry much isn’t so different to the normal shows. He’s still wearing Harry’s ring, though. That’s new.

He isn’t checking Twitter either. They always do a quick scroll through in the car on the way back to the hotel or to the club or to the airport or wherever they’re going after the show, but today he doesn’t feel like it. He hasn’t felt like it for a few days now, as it happens, and he appreciates that on the whole the lads don’t tell him what they’re seeing on there. From the front seat on the way back to the hotel Liam lets out a surprised laugh and says “Apparently Ziam is still real,” before showing everyone a picture of the two of them on stage, Liam’s hand clasped to the back of Zayn’s neck. Zayn remembers that moment, the second of deep, content security he felt before they let go of each other again and the screaming of the crowd got somehow even louder.

He leans over the seat and bites the side of Liam’s neck. “Ziam’s always been real, babe,” he says as Liam’s spluttering, which is ridiculous because he should be used to stuff like that after being around Louis ‘lovebite monster’ Tomlinson for years. 

“Hands off my husband,” Harry says, sounding sulky.

“I didn’t touch him! It’s not my fault he wants my sexy body,” Liam protests, as Niall leans over and starts whispering furiously into Harry’s ear.

“You’re all destroying my life,” Louis says, slinging a leg comfortably over Zayn’s lap as he reaches out to scratch the back of Liam’s head fondly. “I hate this band. I really do.”

“You’re not going to have to hate us for much longer,” Liam says, leaning his head back against Louis’s hand.

“Three US dates,” Louis says, as though he’s counting them off on his fingers. “How many UK dates?”

“Eighteen,” Niall says. “I still think we should do a goodbye tour.”

“We’re not actually splitting up,” Zayn reminds him. The idea of a permanent break is definitely too much for him – he likes to keep his options open. The group plan is to announce a hiatus after this tour is done. His own plan after that is a lot hazier. He doesn’t particularly like thinking about it, if he’s completely honest with himself. He loves sleeping all day and playing video games and not leaving his house during their time off, but he’s not sure how well he could handle a whole life of that. He feels like Shahid will probably drag him out to the studio even when he doesn’t feel like it, and he’ll probably go down the road to Louis’s house for a cup of tea and a joint most days, but Louis has actual plans in a way that Zayn does not. Last time they were in the UK he met the first girl since Eleanor that he really likes, and they’re going to make a proper go of it next time he’s in the country for a while. He’s going to guest judge on The X Factor in preparation for a place on the panel next year, and he and Liam have been muttering about setting up their own label for new music. It’s all great. Zayn’s pleased for him, and he knows for a fact that if any of the rest of them wanted to get in on that label then Louis and Liam would welcome them with open arms. But there’s also part of him that feels strange, because for the last couple of years Louis has been resolutely _his_ , and being left behind is fun for absolutely no one.

“We may as well be,” Harry says, sounding slightly sullen, and Zayn has an abruptly vivid and surprising memory of him in the casino bar with his head in his hands, that night they got married and made their biggest ever mistake. He remembers him saying, _It’s just so sad. I’m just so sad about it._ He stares at Harry for a moment before leaning over Liam’s head so he can pull one of Harry’s curls. Harry lets out a noise of irritation and shakes his head like a lion, but Zayn can see the smallest smile curling into the corner of his mouth as he settles back down again.

*

Zayn waits for Harry that night but he doesn’t come. It’s really not a big deal at all. He flips through TV channels, gets his laptop out and can’t figure out how to get onto the wifi, eats his way through all the peanuts and gummi bears in his minibar – orange, clear, yellow, green, red – and ends up playing Tetris on his phone for half an hour before wandering down to Niall’s room. Niall gives him a blank, confused look and says, “What are you doing here?”

“Dunno.” Zayn does his best not to heave a huge, miserable sigh.

Niall laughs in his face, the prick. “Harry’s at his house,” he says, “if that’s why you look like someone just shit in your soup.”

“His house?”

“You know he’s got a house here.”

Zayn does know that, sort of. “Right,” he says, wishing he’d paid more attention to whatever it is that Harry spends a lot of time mumbling vaguely about.

Niall looks at him and then sighs. “What’s going on with you, anyway?”

“Just, you know. Husbandly duties.” Zayn tries out a crooked, dirty smile but it doesn’t really feel like it’s working. 

Niall rolls his eyes. “All right. Just go there to see him. And don’t come crying to me when you two mess it all up, okay?”

“Okay,” Zayn says humbly. He doesn’t think they’ll mess it up. He doesn’t think there’s anything there to mess up. Just two casual bandmates who accidentally got married. He wonders why Harry went to his house without telling him. He wonders if he has any claim on Harry at all.

“I’ll call a car for you,” Niall says, sounding as though he has terrible misgivings about what he’s about to do, and disappears into his suite. Zayn stays in the corridor and listens to the familiar lilt of his voice. He thinks of Harry, and whatever decisions got them to the point where they are now, and about sinking into Harry’s arms and how desperately his whole body is aching to do it, and whether or not it’s a good idea. They need to get lawyers. Jesus. There’s a faint pain somewhere behind his temples, and it’s a million o’clock, and he doesn’t think his body clock even exists any more. After a moment Niall comes back out and says “Car’s going to be outside in five minutes. You’re aware that you’re a massive wanker, right?”

“Absolutely,” Zayn says, and throws Niall another smile, a better one this time.

*

Harry’s house is nice. He stands back with his arms folded across with his chest as Zayn chucks his bag down on the floor in the hall and toes his shoes off so he doesn’t mess up the pristine pale carpet he can see in the living room. The rest of the house looks like mostly wood and pale walls and gleaming steel; it’s something that Zayn doesn’t recognise as Harry. He thinks of Harry and he thinks of old comfortable sofas and real fires and pub tables with the smell of good ale ground into them. He thinks of Britain, weirdly, even though Harry’s been half-living in LA for years now. Here in this house apparently, even though it doesn’t look all that lived in. Most of their houses look barely lived in, from what Zayn can gather. Sometimes he used to envy Danny and Ant’s places, their posters and their crowded stuff and their scrubby back gardens. He thinks that one day he’d like to paint his own walls instead of hiring someone to buy furniture for him.

“I just thought I’d come over,” he says, “just – you know. I think some photographers caught me leaving the hotel, but fuck them, right?”

“Fuck them,” Harry agrees. “You want a tour of the place?”

Zayn wrinkles his nose. “Who do you think I am, one of your mum’s friends or something? Oooh, yeah, Haz, I’d love to inspect the tiling, by the way, have you got a conservatory?”

Harry laughs at that, the lines around his eyes deepening. “Fair point. You want a drink?”

His kitchen is enormous. “It’s very American,” Zayn observes as he perches on one of the stools at the breakfast bar, feeling a bit like an idiot. There’s a waffle maker and a fancy coffee machine and a food mixer like the one Perrie once asked him to get her for Christmas. She’d asked for a pale pink one, but he’d forgotten to tell his assistant that, so she’d ended up with a cherry red one instead. “They were out of pink when I asked,” he’d told her, hating the slight flicker of disappointment in her eyes, the fact that she probably knew there was a lie somewhere in there, something he hadn’t bothered to do himself. Like she’d forgiven the other shit, the other girls, all the time he chose not to spend with her, but this was the last straw. “Just one gesture, Zayn. Just one thing coming right from you,” she’d once said to him, when they were both at the end of their tethers. He has nice ideas, he knows that much. He sends a lot of flowers, by which he means he tells his assistant to send a lot of flowers. He doesn’t remember the last time he wrote a gift card himself. Maybe that’s something he should change.

“Thanks, I think,” Harry says, from the other side of the vast granite-topped bar in the middle of the room. 

“It’s a compliment,” Zayn says.

“Coming from you?” Harry raises an eyebrow.

“Hey, I like America a lot. I just couldn’t live that far from my mum.”

Harry’s in the middle of grabbing a couple of beers from the fridge; Zayn watches as his shoulders tense up. “And it makes me an arsehole that I can?”

“No. Did I say that? Makes you…” Zayn searches for words. “Independent. That’s okay.”

“I suppose so.” Harry closes the fridge and brings the beers over, frowning a bit as he hands one over and leans against the bar next to Zayn. 

Zayn opens his beer and takes a swig. He’d really like a cigarette too right now, or to fish one of the joints he rolled earlier out of his bag, but he’s fairly sure this is a no-smoking house. “So,” he says, after a moment. He doesn’t usually feel the need to fill silences, but there’s part of him that won’t stop thinking about Harry’s hands and his mouth and the way he feels. “The gig wasn’t too awkward.”

Harry arches an eyebrow and smiles, very faintly. “Wasn’t it?”

Zayn blinks at him. “Erm… no?” He feels as though he’s suddenly losing a game he wasn’t aware they were playing.

“It’s all right. Eye contact’s tricky. I get that.” Harry’s suddenly looking hard at the floor.

“What?” There’s a big part of Zayn that wants to laugh disbelievingly. “Are you annoyed with me?”

Harry looks at him again, dead-eyed. “Why on earth would I be annoyed with you?” he says dryly.

“We never said anything about what we were going to do on stage,” Zayn snaps, feeling irritated. “If you expect me to do something you have to tell me what it actually is. Accidentally marrying you doesn’t mean I can suddenly read your shitting mind, Harry.”

Harry’s expression’s starting to crack. He looks like a stupid tired irritable baby. Zayn wants to kick him in the shin and walk out and storm out and go back to the hotel. “It’s just embarrassing,” Harry mumbles after a moment. “Like, we get married and everyone knows about it and you don’t even look at me on stage and everyone on Twitter was saying—”

“You need to stop looking at fucking Twitter,” Zayn tells him, sliding off the stool. “Never complain, never explain, remember? You were the one who said that. We don’t owe them _anything_ except to work hard on the shows and albums that they’re paying for. Come on, you fucking idiot. Show your guest-slash-husband a little respect and don’t make me sit on a kitchen stool all evening.”

There’s a tiny smile hugging Harry’s lips now. “All right,” he mumbles. 

Zayn throws him a smile back, feeling brighter now. “You want some fucking eye contact, I’ll give you eye contact.” He slings an arm around Harry’s neck, pulls him in close and pushes himself up, tangling his hand in Harry’s messy hair so he can press their foreheads together, looking hard into Harry’s green eyes and feeling him grinning now, eyelashes brushing together as they blink, their chests pressed tight. He thinks he can feel the faint flutter of Harry’s heart and his stomach jolts a little but he doesn’t move, doesn’t move, doesn’t move – and then it’s like an internal timer’s gone off, and he steps away from Harry and grabs his hand instead. “Is your living room through there?” he asks, and drags Harry out of the kitchen and down the hallway into the cream-carpeted room.

The far wall is essentially just a strip of glass, like Zayn’s back windows in his house in London, except this place doesn’t look out onto a suburban garden and grey skies. There’s the rippling glowing blue water of Harry’s pool, and a green leafy yard, and beyond that a valley, barely visible in the dark, lit by a few golden glows from houses and streetlights. There’s a solid strip of wall where the TV’s hung, and a deep red sofa in front of that, more the sort of thing Zayn thought Harry would have, something that finally makes sense, with blankets hanging over the back and soft cushions piled up on it. 

“You like it?” Harry asks, squeezing his hand.

“It’s all right,” Zayn says, meaning Yes. 

“Good,” Harry says. “We’re married. You’re my next of kin. If I die, all of this is yours. There’s a fake brick under the windowsill by the front door with a spare key in it.”

“Oh.” Zayn swallows and looks around, suddenly feeling a little ill. “If you die before we get divorced, don’t worry, I’ll give it all to your mum. Don’t you have a will? My mum made me do a will when we started earning money. I’m leaving everything to her and my dad for the time being.”

“Did she make you do that when you said you were getting engaged?” Harry asks.

Zayn stares at him until he laughs and looks away. “Kidding.”

“Not funny,” Zayn says, even though it is, a bit. “Anyway, don’t die.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“No sudden heart attacks while you’re doing your stupid workouts.”

“You’re the one who’s going to have a sudden heart attack because you don’t do any stupid workouts,” Harry points out, probably accurately.

Zayn thinks about telling him to shut up, but it’s so much easier to smile up at Harry instead. “Would you miss me?” he asks.

“Desperately,” Harry says, not quite getting enough sarcasm in there.

Zayn hmms out a laugh, and pulls Harry over to the sofa. He remembers how this goes now: late night visits, alcohol on their mouths. The sober times were always the hardest, waking up together the next morning and remembering every single thing and wondering how much they’d regret it, how much they already regretted it. He collects their beers and puts them down out of the way and presses Harry down and climbs on top of him. Harry looks lost already, reaching up for him, eyes on his mouth; Zayn bites his bottom lip just because he likes Harry’s gaze on it, runs the tip of his tongue over it before leaning in to kiss him, hard and dirty, grinding down onto Harry’s dick through their jeans. Harry makes a faint, helpless noise, grips Zayn’s hips to direct him and kisses him back, messy and desperate. It takes Zayn way too long to get Harry out of his stupid skinny jeans and they end up laughing when Harry almost kicks him in the face, but it’s all good, this is fine, this is recognisable. This is what they do. 

Zayn sinks down between Harry’s legs and sucks his cock. He loves it, the weight of it, the size and shape and the taste of him. He presses between his legs and Harry tilts his hips up pleasingly quickly so Zayn can press spit-soaked fingers inside him. He fucks him slowly with his fingers, adds a third and feels Harry shudder and come, sweet saltiness on Zayn’s tongue as he swallows, more eagerly than he ever has for anyone else. He thinks that maybe later he’ll request, sweetly, that Harry comes on his face. He’s never tried that, even though he’s done it to other people a million times. He thinks it looks like fun.

Harry directs him to lube and condoms, which he keeps shoved between the sofa cushions. “I love that you’re a bit of a slag who’s always prepared,” Zayn tells him approvingly, and Harry laughs as he rolls onto his front and gets on his hands and knees, arse bobbing beautifully into the air. It’s such a good, good bum. Zayn has to smack it appreciatively with his left hand, the one with Harry’s ring on. Seems fitting. Harry gasps loudly, which Zayn had forgotten– how receptive he can be, in a gorgeous, extravagant way. The way he doesn’t hold back and wouldn’t know how to if he tried.

Zayn sinks into him slowly, hands tight on his hips. Harry sounds breathless and desperate, and when he pushes himself backwards Zayn stops and squeezes his fingers in so that Harry knows to keep still. “Hey,” Harry gasps, but he stills anyway, the line of his back so delicately drawn and so beautiful, the arcs of his shoulder blades, the soft shadows of his muscles, the tiny dusky blond hairs on the back of his neck that you can only see when he’s like this with his head down and his hair falling over his face. Zayn traces the soft bumps of his spine until he reaches the nape of his neck and then he tangles his fingers in Harry’s curls and pulls his head up. Harry lets out a low, turned on noise, glances backwards over his shoulder. There are beads of sweat glistening in the small of his back and on his forehead. “Zayn, please,” he says, and so Zayn starts to fuck him, hard right from the start because he knows what Harry can take. He knows what Harry likes. Logically he knows it’s from previous years and previous tours but in his heart he feels like they’ve both always known. This has always been the easiest thing between them. He sometimes feels like he was born to fuck Harry Styles, although he also thinks he probably shares that feeling with a lot of teenage girls.

But when Harry’s like this – God. The tight curve of his hip under Zayn’s hand, the way he moans, so transparently into it that Zayn wants to punch him and kiss him at the same time. He couldn’t do that in a million years, enjoy things that much and completely let go. It’s like the way Harry is on stage, dancing around all long limbs and stupid smiles. He’s so not Zayn’s type at all. And yet the feel of him, his tightness, the way he meets each thrust, hands fisted in cushions that probably cost him thousands. Zayn feels like he’s losing touch with reality as he fucks him harder and hears Harry’s words dissolve into gibberish, but that’s fine, he supposes, that’s fine; he doesn’t think he understood them anyway.

*

They fall asleep together in Harry’s enormous bed after traipsing naked to the bedroom together, Zayn folding himself between the sheets as Harry fusses around turning lights off and going downstairs to make sure the doors are locked before bringing them both glasses of water, as though he’s Zayn’s mum and not someone Zayn was fucking hard less than fifteen minutes ago. He’s on his side with his eyes shut, drifting half into sleep, when Harry lies down next to him. The light flips off, the golden darkness behind his eyelids falling into complete blackness, and Harry lets out a soft mmming sigh as he stretches out. Then he rolls over to Zayn’s side of the bed and puts an arm around his waist, burrowing into him, knees pressing into the crook of Zayn’s legs, the rough side of Harry’s faintly stubbled face scratching over his neck. “Zayn?” Harry says, and Zayn lets himself be quiet for a moment, lets himself just be. Harry holds still and then he kisses the back of Zayn’s shoulder. It’s nothing, it’s too much and not enough, but then Harry’s arms tighten around him and he presses his head to Zayn’s back as though he’s trying to imprint himself there. 

“It’s okay,” Zayn finds himself muttering into the darkness, reaching down to touch Harry’s hands with his own. “It’s all right.”

“Y’awake?” Harry mumbles into his neck, a new tenseness pushing its way through his body, a millimetre further from Zayn than he was before.

“A bit. Go to sleep. Go to sleep, babe, you’re all right,” Zayn tells him, and presses back into him, pushes an ankle between Harry’s to tangle their legs, twists his head at the most horrible awkward degree to kiss the side of Harry’s head. He feels Harry relax, his arms around Zayn tight but comfortable. In the dark Zayn feels Harry’s hands tangle in his, fingertips dancing lightly over his new ring.

*

They play another show in LA, during which Zayn does his level best not to ignore Harry and is rewarded with bright smiles and a lot of silly dancing, and then right afterwards they fly to New York in their two separate jets. Zayn goes with Louis and Liam so they can smoke, and Niall and Harry go on the other plane so they can play tiddlywinks and do yoga and drink things with wheatgrass in or whatever stupid healthy things they do on their stupid healthy jet. Zayn and Liam and Louis drink whisky and play poker for cigarettes and pretend they’re in the mafia, and every time the conversation veers towards the topic of Harry Zayn finds himself shrinking into monosyllables. He can see Louis and Liam throwing glances at each other and Zayn doesn’t feel like it; he just wants to get things sorted out in his own head first, he just wants to fall into bed with Harry and have that be that. Somehow it’s morning when they land, which is odd, and although he wants to trail up to his hotel room and fall asleep he gets ambushed by Harry in the corridor, inexplicably already in tiny yellow bathing trunks. “Let’s go to the pool!” he says cheerfully.

Zayn wants to push him down the stairs. “It’s ten in the morning and I haven’t slept all night and I need to ring my mum,” he says instead.

“You should come out to the pool,” Harry says. He reaches out and takes Zayn’s hands and smiles at him in the intimate ‘I’m Harry Styles, and I’m dangerously charismatic’ sort of way that’s probably sent a lot of fourteen year olds spiralling to their lovelorn deaths. “After you talk to your mum, obviously. You can sleep next to me on a sunlounger…” He raises his eyebrows, smiling brightly, like Zayn’s a recalcitrant child he has to tempt outside with treats.

“No way,” Zayn tells him, removing his hands from Harry’s. He’s being stupid, this is a public space, there could be anyone with a camera around. “I’ll see you later.”

The downcast look on Harry’s face plays on his mind as he finds his room and charges his phone and finally rings his mum. He thinks about the sad tilt to Harry’s smile as his mum talks about weddings and how she can’t believe he didn’t tell her what was going on and how excited his sisters are. _It was a mistake, Mum_ , he wants to say, but somehow does not. Of course, when they’re done he puts on his swimming trunks and grabs a hotel towel and goes down to the pool and scowls his way onto the sunlounger next to Harry’s. Harry gives him a big delighted smile and shuffles his sunlounger closer so the sides are touching, and then he starts telling Zayn all about the book he’s reading, his big hands dancing lightly across the air as he gestures softly. Zayn watches him talk and thinks, maybe. Maybe one day this could have been it. Holidays in the sun next to Harry, nonsensical conversations he only bothers to half follow and that he finds completely charming and brilliant nonetheless. He thinks of Harry pottering around Zayn’s kitchen at home, tanned feet and long toes and bony ankles, asking him where the tea spoons are and complaining about the way he never empties the clean things out of his dishwasher. He thinks of hearing his funny, sweet, meandering voice all the time, somewhere gently in the background. No more too-big rooms, no more too-quiet nights. 

Halfway through the conversation Zayn reaches out and takes Harry’s hand, just because he wants to. Harry smells like sun lotion and his palm is a little slimy with it but Zayn holds onto it anyway. Harry pauses, right in the middle of a story about how fantastic and brilliant a penguin video he saw on YouTube is, and looks down at their hands together with the brightest smile Zayn thinks he’s ever seen, before carrying on.

Zayn closes his eyes when Harry’s immersed in something on his kindle again, still holding hands. The sky is blue and so big it hurts and he feels like if he wanted to, he could close his eyes and float effortlessly upwards, away from everything, into some sort of blissful oblivion. But Harry is an anchor here, somehow. Zayn’s still working on it. He wants to figure it out.

*

The pictures are online the next day. Zayn breaks his no-internet rule drastically when he’s still in bed and Harry’s in the shower, and googles his own name just to see what’s going on. He’s still boneless and miraculously not exhausted after a good night’s sleep, following a day dozing in the sun and an evening spent thoroughly sucking Harry’s dick in his hotel room and then washing spunk out of his eye while Harry laughed helplessly behind him. The photos are of the two of them in their sunglasses, sprawled out together, Harry talking animatedly and Zayn smiling like he can’t quite believe his luck, their heads drawn together. They look almost as intimate as it felt. Then there are pictures of them holding hands, intensely grainy like they were taken from lightyears away. Zayn’s stomach does something unpleasant and squirmy as he scrolls down one of about a million articles. He feels invaded.

_Surprise newlyweds and One Direction hunks Harry Styles and Zayn Malik spent today catching some rays by their hotel pool in Manhattan. The two heartthrobs broke hearts across the world when their surprise Las Vegas wedding was revealed by TMZ on Tuesday. A source commented ‘Harry and Zayn have been seeing each other for around six months, just after Zayn split from Perrie. They’ve been so happy together that they decided to tie the knot and make it official.’ It looks like married life’s suiting the two lovebirds!_

It’s astonishing, Zayn reflects a little sourly, how difficult it is to sue websites who cite ‘sources’ when what they’re actually doing is making a lot of bullshit up. He can hear Harry’s voice faintly over the sound of the shower, low and melodic, and for a moment he considers leaving. He can’t imagine having been with him for six months. It’s been less than a week of hooking up since their accidental wedding and Harry already annoys him at least a million times a day. He doesn’t know how to do this, how to walk this weird tightrope and somehow come off alive on the other side. Risks have never been his thing. Sometimes he wishes he’d never set foot on that X Factor audition stage.

The shower flips off and a moment later Harry wanders out, all gleaming brown skin and ink and a tangle of wet dark hair. He grins at Zayn and sings out “The shower’s all yours! Bit drippy in there though, sorry!”

“They got the pictures from yesterday,” Zayn says, a little desperate, feeling pinched and awful. “Of us by the pool.”

“Oh.” Harry frowns, like a ridiculous, pouting child. Then he says, “You told me, don’t look at Twitter, remember? Sod them.” He reaches over, grabs Zayn’s phone and throws it decisively on the floor. 

Zayn says “I didn’t look at Twitter! You can’t just…” and then Harry sits on him and shakes his wet hair all over his face. Zayn gasps, both mildly horrified and insanely happy about the fact that Harry’s very naked under his towel.

“I can just, actually,” Harry says, and lowers his mouth to Zayn’s. “I’m Harry fucking Styles. I’m king of the world. I can do anything I like.” He kisses the corner of Zayn’s mouth, cradling the side of his head like it’s something precious, his fingers raking through Zayn’s hair.

“Anything,” Zayn breathes, untucking Harry’s towel, running fingertips across his abdomen and his taut tattooed skin, lingering over the left fern and that covered up tattoo from years ago.

“Absolutely anything,” Harry confirms, and then frowns as Zayn chucks the towel on the floor. “Hey, what about the hotel maids?”

“Shut up,” Zayn says, pushing up and rolling him over, and God, Harry’s a sight for sore eyes, all messy hair and red mouth and bright eyes. He remembers this from years ago, the way that laughter half bubbled on Harry’s lips when they were both heady with the promise of something new. He feels a lot older than he really is. That feels like longer ago than it really was. He remembers looking at Harry during shows and wanting to get him back to the hotel, and spank him maybe, and figure him out entirely. He still doesn’t think he’s managed that last one. He kind of likes that he probably never will.

*

They play Madison Square Garden twice, both times sold out. The first night Harry reaches out and takes his hand halfway through _Story of My Life_ , and Zayn lets him. The roar that goes up from the crowd is insane, but it’s louder the next night when Zayn throws an arm around Harry’s neck and draws him in close and kisses his cheek right after Harry’s solo in _What Makes You Beautiful_. Louis says “They’re so disgusting,” sounding delighted, and Liam looks at them like a proud misty-eyed father, and Niall makes everyone cheer for them again. Zayn feels in equal parts happy and extremely stupid.

They have a party after the second concert, around the rooftop pool at their hotel. Harry wanders around making friends with everyone and somehow remembering the names of people he’s only ever met for thirty seconds before, while Zayn lingers in the corner with Louis, smoking and catching glasses of champagne every time they’re handed round by flustered-looking girls wearing strangely formal uniforms. 

“So is it a proper thing now, you and Harry?” Louis asks. “Don’t get all funny with me, I’m allowed to ask.”

“You are definitely allowed,” Zayn agrees. “Doesn’t mean I have to answer, though.”

Louis heaves a sigh, as if he’s about to do something extremely wearying that he’ll regret one day, and then he leaps on top of Zayn and starts tickling him. “Don’t make me do this, Malik,” he says in Zayn’s ear, a bit breathless. “There are easier ways.”

“Like waterboarding?” Zayn asks as Louis releases him.

Louis throws a long and meaningful glance at the pool.

Zayn sighs. “We’re just doing our thing,” he says.

“That means literally nothing,” Louis says.

“We just – you know,” Zayn says.

“I absolutely don’t know,” Louis tells him patiently.

Words are extremely difficult things, Zayn wants to tell him. And relationships are even harder, and he doesn’t know what’s happening, and he can’t wrap his mind around it. All he knows is that for a night he loved Harry enough to want to marry him, and that he doesn’t want to fuck up in front of the whole world yet again, and that the idea of waking up alone is something that makes his whole body hurt with weariness. Instead he throws Louis a bit of a smile and says “It’s fun, right? You know me and Harry. We always had fun.”

“Yeah, I know,” Louis mutters. When they were younger, when Zayn was twenty and they were touring and he was with Perrie but they weren’t engaged yet, he and Harry were a bit of an open secret. Once Zayn had a conversation with Liam that involved a lot of rum and Liam putting his head in his hands and saying things like “We should have talked about it more,” and “I knew it’d mess everything up. I _knew_ it,” while Zayn mmmed and tried to check the time on his phone unobtrusively. But he doesn’t think it messed everything up, not exactly. Not for the band, anyway. Maybe for him and Harry at times, but if Zayn is strictly honest with himself – something he’s trying so hard to get better at – he doesn’t think he and Harry have ever truly been friends.

Zayn tries to smile at Louis but it feels wrong, just like the words that always come out wrong even when he’s doing his best. He wants to stand up and yell, to throw his champagne glass over the edge of the building and hear it shatter on the street below. Except he won’t do that because he really doesn’t feel like reading the headline ‘Gay Married Boybander Kills Passerby’ in the papers tomorrow. He clears his throat and says “We’re not going to fuck it up, Louis. And we’re taking a break soon anyway.”

“Yeah,” Louis says, and then points out, “Except I’d actually quite like to be able to come back after the break if we want to one day.”

Zayn makes a noise of agreement in his throat, not especially wanting to make eye contact with him. He doesn’t know if he wants to come back yet, but there’s a lot of time to decide. Once they’re on their break he’ll have nothing but time on his hands. Across the terrace Niall and Liam are headbutting a balloon at each other, and Harry’s talking to Lou, in that intense way that always used to make Zayn jealous until he realised that’s just the way Harry’s face is. He seems to sense that Zayn’s eyes are on him because he looks sideways and makes eye contact before smiling slowly, his dimple edging itself into his cheek. If Zayn wanted to stop himself smiling back, he doesn’t think he’d be able to, and at that Harry’s smile just broadens and deepens.

“Jesus Christ,” Louis mutters. “I may be sick.”

“What?” Zayn says. Harry’s pushing through towards them now, almost tripping over someone’s foot and apologising profusely. He’s so nice to people. Zayn needs to work harder on that. His heart hurts with how much he likes Harry sometimes. “Hey,” he says, as Harry comes up to them and slips onto the sofa next to him, nudging at Zayn’s arm until he puts it over his shoulders. Harry relaxes into his side and Zayn feels too exposed for a moment before he remembers _We’re doing this so we don’t fuck up and make people think we’re a joke. We’re doing this so that our fans don’t think we’re bastards who make horrible mistakes. We’re doing this so we look like we’re in love._ Harry nudges a couple of kisses onto the side of Zayn’s jaw and it somehow pulls all the tension out of Zayn’s body; he reaches up to touch Harry’s hair for a moment, the soft silky ends of it, and Harry presses into his hand. 

“Dear God,” Louis says. “I need another drink. So this is…” He looks between Zayn and Harry with a raised eyebrow. “What. What is this?”

The comfort is gone and the tension is back. Panic is coiling coldly in the bottom of Zayn’s stomach, tightening in his throat. “We fucked up and got married by mistake,” he says. “We’re allowed to have a bit of fun with it, aren’t we?”

“Right,” Harry says, something lacking in his voice. Zayn turns his head to look into Harry’s eyes but he’s oddly resistant about looking back as he untangles himself and gets to his feet again. “I’ll see you later, yeah?” Harry rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet like he’s trying to coax more words out of himself, but he doesn’t. He just looks at Louis and shrugs a bit before disappearing off again across the terrace.

There’s a moment of quiet. Zayn gets to his feet and looks over the edge of the balcony and out across the city. He thinks he prefers this place to Vegas so far, just because it feels more like real life. He thinks of the view out of the back of Harry’s house in LA, the stillness, the slow ripple of the water and Harry right there in front of him. Zayn’s never been a massive fan of LA but he thinks that one might have won it this time. Next to him, Louis gets to his feet and stands next to him, nudges Zayn’s hip with his own. “You’re in deep shit this time, aren’t you, DJ Malik,” he says, and Zayn can do nothing but nod.

*

Harry comes to Zayn’s room that night. They’re both drunk, a bit vague and a bit messy, and Zayn thinks that makes it easier. They kiss and Harry almost falls over getting out of his jeans and they laugh and then they kiss again, over and over, until the laughter’s forgotten. Zayn presses himself up against Harry and feels Harry’s hands on him, on his shoulders and his arms, skating gently over his back like he’s trying to memorise him. The hotel room is an oasis of calm, the lights low and golden and the bed perfectly made, all crisp white sheets and gleaming quilt. Zayn feels like he’s swimming through a dream as the backs of his knees hit the bed and he shifts back, draped in Harry, covered in Harry, nothing but him and Harry. They kiss, his hand in Harry’s hair, one of his legs caught around Harry’s. This feels like the last night, somehow. Zayn wants to say sorry for earlier, that awkwardness by the pool with Louis. He wants to make Harry stay. 

Instead he asks Harry to fuck him. He doesn’t slide down comfortably onto his dick this time. Zayn lets him do it slow and romantic, the way Harry likes it sometimes. No scented candles, but tonight he thinks if Harry wanted to roll off him to light his favourite jasmine Diptyque, he’d probably let him. Zayn would lie there naked as anything and watch Harry as the flame illuminated his face, his concentrated brow and the pink line of his thoughtful mouth. He’d wait for Harry to string up fairy lights and sprinkle rose petals and do whatever the fuck he wants, so long as he doesn’t leave. 

Harry touches him like he’s something precious. Zayn doesn’t know why he never noticed that before. He traces his tattoos with his fingertips and he mouths over Zayn’s nipples and again, harder, when he hears Zayn gasp. He finds the arches of skin above Zayn’s hips that makes him shiver, and smiles up at him.

“You soppy shit,” Zayn tells him, his voice rough with he doesn’t know what.

“I’m supposed to be,” Harry says. “We’re married, remember?”

Sometimes Zayn really does forget that: when they’re onstage and he’s hitting his notes, or he’s humming along to Niall and his guitar, or when he wakes up and sees Harry’s sleeping face in the dim light and feels for a moment as though it’s years ago and he’s got a girl back home and a boy on the road. Sometimes he forgets that now there’s nothing stopping him. He rakes his fingers deep through Harry’s hair and Harry turns his face so he can kiss the inside of Zayn’s wrist.

Married. Yeah. Married. He could do with that, with this every night for the rest of his life. He thought before when he proposed to Perrie that that was what he wanted, and in hindsight he can understand his reasoning: he’d wanted someone to come home to, someone on the other end of the phone, someone who he was certain loved him. Harry would never be waiting at home. Harry is terrible at picking up the phone. He doesn’t think he could ever be certain that Harry loved him. He doesn’t think he could ever be certain of Harry at all. Moments like this though, when Harry’s biting down his stomach, hair tickling his chest, he thinks he could do it quite happily.

When Harry pushes into him it’s slow and it feels a bit like touching heaven. His legs are bent at what seemed initially like an unfeasible angle, but it’s working out just fine, the burn and the stretch of it, the slide of Harry, his mouth on Zayn’s and Zayn’s arms around his neck. He touches the messy tangles of Harry’s hair and the soft baby hairs on the back of his neck and the side of his jaw and pulls him down to kiss him. He thinks, _I’m having sex with my husband,_ and Harry kisses the smile off his face. It’s slow and then it’s fast, the bed shuddering and the kisses messier. Pressure builds through his body as their foreheads knock together, sweat slick and desperate, and Harry says, “God. God, you’re so fit. God,” and almost draws blood when he bites Zayn’s bottom lip.

Zayn comes first, pulsing hot and wet between them, but Harry isn’t far after him, stilling, eyes fluttering shut. Afterwards he kisses Zayn, light and delicate, like he’s asking tentative questions he’s starting to learn the answers to.

*

“Are you coming back to London?” Zayn asks when they’re lying tangled up together, nose pressed against Harry’s collarbone. He smells like sweat and soap and something slightly minty. Zayn would like whatever Harry smells like to be bottled, so he can sniff it whenever he likes.

“No. LA for a few days,” Harry says, and kisses Zayn’s temple, once and then again, before wriggling a bit so he can press their foreheads together. From this angle his eyes look alarmingly wide-spaced.

“Oh, all right,” Zayn says, mind racing as he pulls back a bit. He thinks of photographers at the airport in London shouting questions at him when he gets back alone, and then waiting outside his house, ready to find him every time he tries to walk the dogs that he always forgets he doesn’t have any more because Perrie took them with her, or when he wants to go out to buy some cigarettes or a pint of milk. He thinks of the headlines. _One Directioners In Shock Love Split. LA Considerably More Interesting Than Zayn Malik, As It Turns Out. Should Have Worked That One Out Sooner, Shouldn’t He? Ha, Ha. What A Twat._ “Cool, so I’ll just…”

“I would have asked you to come with me,” Harry says, “but you like going home, don’t you?”

Zayn does like going home, Harry’s right there. He likes getting home and putting a brew on, and flicking on his TV to see if his Sky Plus box has been able to cope with everything he’s put on to record, and looking to see which comic books have been delivered while he’s been away. He likes inviting his cousins to come and stay with him, taking them to expensive clubs and paying for all their drinks before driving up to Bradford together. He likes eating food cooked by his mum that hasn’t come from Tupperwares in his freezer, and ordering handbags and bracelets off Net A Porter for his sisters, and going to the gym with his dad and being given a ‘Guest’ membership pass for the day, like when he was little and he’d wait for his dad in the little gym café with a fried egg sandwich and a can of Fanta and his old battered copy of _Fantastic Mr Fox._

But this time around, LA doesn’t sound so bad, staying in Harry’s big house with his pool and his view and his infinitely wide bed. Waking tangled up with him and maybe showering together, the way he and Perrie sometimes used to. Making toast for breakfast for someone other than himself. It doesn’t sound too bad. He tells himself, _Invite yourself. Go with him_ , but God, the idea of walking through LAX with him, the photographs and the articles. The scrutiny is always ten times worse when Harry’s there, and going to LA would make it look like they were trying to publicly be together. It’s the opposite of doing it quietly, the way he wishes he could do everything about this band. He wants to retreat to his house with Harry instead of putting themselves on display. The idea of it makes every single bit of him want to curl up in a dark corner with his hands over his face.

“I suppose I do like being in England,” he says, instead. 

“Exactly,” Harry says quietly. There’s a moment of quiet, as Harry traces shapes on one of Zayn’s shoulder blades. “I’ll be back soon, though.”

“Well,” Zayn says, telling himself to man the fuck up. “Come round for a cuppa and a blowie when you’re around, yeah?”

Harry laughs, a second too late. “Will do.”

“We need to talk to our lawyers too,” Zayn reminds him, “at some point.”

“Right.” Another moment. Harry’s hand stills on Zayn’s back and he nudges the tip of Zayn’s nose with his own, presses their mouths together. Zayn doesn’t object or move; he just lies there and kisses Harry back and thinks, dully, of what the weeks ahead of them might hold.

*

Zayn’s house is big and bright and it feels like home, which he supposes is nice. It’s different from all the hotels anyway, less clean and bland and neutrally decorated. It’s good to be back, he thinks. The flight was on time and he got to watch the new Will Smith film and then he managed to sleep the rest of the way, which was for the best because he knows he always gets grumpy when he doesn’t get enough sleep. The car journey back to North London with Louis was a proper laugh, because it always is, and he even remembered where his keys were: the zipped inside pocket of the rucksack he carries from hotel to venue to hotel to jet, which he doesn’t think he’s opened in… God. Not in a long time. It’s been a while since he’s been home.

He puts his bags down in the hallway and makes himself a cup of tea without any milk in it because he hasn’t got any. As he knows from painful past experiences, tea without milk is diabolically disgusting, but he finishes it anyway. He’s many things but he refuses to be a tea-waster. The sheets on his bed smell stale and faintly unwashed but he goes to bed anyway, and sleeps until it’s midday and light is streaming through his windows. There are no photographers outside so he nips down to the petrol station to buy a bag of bread and some milk and some eggs, and then he makes something faintly disgusting for dinner with some spaghetti hoops, a lot of ketchup and four pieces of toast with two fried eggs balanced on top.

So he finishes his gross food and he pokes through his new stash of comic books, and then he rings Doniya, who screams excitedly about him being home and makes promises to visit him in London that he bets will never happen because her boss never gives her time off. Then she tells him that he has to bring Harry up to Bradford, and Zayn says, “You know it’s not real, right? It’s not – we weren’t actually going out?”

“You’re not really married?” she asks, sounding uncertain. “But the certificate…”

“No.” Zayn huffs out a sigh, and thinks of Harry in LA on his red sofa with his expensive food mixer and his pristine carpet and his huge, beautiful pool. Zayn’s got a pool too, out the back, but it’s usually too cold to swim in it, so there isn’t any point in keeping up the maintenance now Perrie isn’t there to use it with her mates over the summer when he’s touring. Louis suggested bringing his skateboard over to try to use it like a halfpipe, but it’s the wrong shape and Zayn’s worried Louis might die if he tries it. He thinks of Harry spread out in his huge bed, his soft snuffling snores, his tousled hair, and feels a clench of the deepest affection in his stomach. “Technically, yeah, we’re married. But we were drunk,” he says. “And really stupid. And in Vegas, you know? It’s what you do when you’re drunk and stupid in Vegas.”

“Oh.” Doniya’s voice sounds smaller. “Mum says she’s making you a cake.”

“Tell her…” Tell her not to, he wants to say, tell her to chuck away the batter if she’s already started. Tell her it’s useless, and Harry’s in a different country, and he probably never cared anyway. Tell her that Zayn fucked it up years ago, back when he chose Perrie over Harry, and now Harry’s going to choose a thousand different things over Zayn, not that Zayn would ever ask him to make any choices at all because he knows how that’ll probably end up, and he isn’t a fan of rejection. Instead he says, “Tell her thank you. But we’re not going to be celebrating any time soon. We don’t want to be those cocks who make massive drunk mistakes like this, so we’re just riding it out until we can split up.” Even though Doniya is his older sister, he still feels the ridiculous need to protect her from his shitty decisions. This feels like crap.

“Right.” Doniya exhales thoughtfully. “But there were pictures. Were they totally staged? I don’t understand this. I don’t get why you need to do that, it seems like such a lie. I don’t get why things are set up, and—”

“They weren’t staged.” He thinks of holding Harry’s hand in the sun and looking at the curve of his mouth and listening to his low, silly, rambling words, and liking every bit of him.

“Oh, Zayn,” she says, sounding sad.

“Don’t do that, don’t – I’m okay,” he tells her. “All right? I’m fine.”

“I know you are,” she says, sounding like she isn’t too sure if she knows that at all. 

“Really,” he tells her. “Like, fine.”

“You said you were fine when you and Perrie broke up.”

“I was fine.”

“You weren’t fine, Zayn.”

“Can you get off my fucking case, please?” There’s a pause, and then he says, “Listen, I’m sorry, yeah?” He hates apologising, and he’s crap at it too. He always sounds faintly hostile, even when he doesn’t mean to.

“It’s all right, you dickhead.” And his family always forgive him right away. It makes him feel like a total bastard every time. “Listen, I’ll come down soon,” Doniya promises. “And you have to come up here. Bring Harry, don’t bring Harry, do whatever you want. You know it’s your decision. You know we’ll love you—”

“You know I’m probably not going to come up there soon, right?” he asks, voice a little jagged. He doesn’t know how he’ll deal with it, being asked questions that he doesn’t know the answer to. Not well, that’s for sure.

“Yeah.” She sounds faintly sad. “I know. But the option’s always there.”

Somehow, that makes him feel a little better.

*

He sleepwalks through the next few days – goes to the studio with Shahid, orders takeaways for dinner because there’s nothing more depressing than cooking for one, goes to Louis’s house for a Mario Kart night which turns into a FIFA night that Louis thoroughly beats him at. It’s all fine. Harry’s laying low, apparently. Zayn sees pictures of him with Jeff Azoff on the Mail Online with the headline _Trouble In Paradise? Married Directioner Spotted With Mystery Male_ – and gets a few stupid snapchats off him: a cat, a pot plant, a pair of sunglasses, a carrier bag on the floor. Some texts too: _Pool’s lovely tonight. Could do with some company. H. x,_ and _Half a heart without you. H. x,_ which was sent at around 3AM LA time, which means he was probably more than a little pissed. Zayn’s okay with that. He sort of likes it – messages like that help the tension to unfurl from his shoulders as the heavy knot in his stomach untangles a little. 

He isn’t sure what to say back to Harry back, so he just says _Ha ;) x x_ and stands in front of his bathroom mirror. He takes his t-shirt off, and his jogging bottoms too, and then his pants. He drops them on the floor and kicks them out of the way, and wipes flecks of dust off the mirror so he looks good in his reflection. Never let it be said that Zayn takes a bad selfie. He undoes the bun of hair on the back of his head and shakes it out, a little wavy, flopping over the side of his head and falling over his face, and then he wraps his hand around his cock. He thinks of Harry on his knees in front of him, mouth open, hand on the base of Zayn’s dick, pink lips stretching gorgeously round the head. He should probably be embarrassed by how fast he gets hard thinking about it. Harry’s wide green eyes looking up at him, begging for it, mouth open wide as he takes it all, so willing, so sweet, so – fuck. Fuck, yes. Zayn opens his eyes, takes in his reflection again. There’s a hazy flush over his cheekbones and collarbone, his dick so hard in his hand that he’d pay thousands for Harry to appear for real. Millions. He’s got them. He opens his legs a little, fists his dick, lets his hair fall over his eyes and takes a picture of his reflection. He sends it to Harry and then wanks himself off, leaning against the sink, cold porcelain biting into his leg, coming choked out and curled over, thinking of Harry, Harry, always fucking Harry.

*

Harry texts back a selfie of himself looking delighted and then a series of artistic black and white shots of his arse, which Zayn supposes he shouldn’t be surprised by. He lives through the next few days, spends one night with Shahid at the studio and the next night crashing in one of Louis’s spare rooms. He spends the third night alone, just him, eating a Chinese takeaway and watching Top Gear repeats and telling himself that he really should learn how to drive. Sleeping is difficult that night, for some reason. Zayn lies in bed and counts sheep and refuses to allow himself to check the time on his phone. It’s a bit like having jetlag, but usually he can sleep anywhere. It’s properly shit. 

He gets up and goes down to his kitchen and sits at the breakfast bar with a bowl of Frosties, keeps topping up the yellowing sugary milk with more and more cereal until half the box is gone and he feels a bit sick. His house has never felt bigger and he can see his reflection in one of the huge windows. He looks smaller than he feels, a weird hunched over skinny figure in a black hoodie and baggy shorts. Sometimes he wonders who he really is, and if he’ll ever figure it out over the course of this fucked up life that he’s chosen for himself, but then he inevitably hates himself for not enjoying it as much as he should. He’s so lucky. He knows that. He rolls himself a spliff, that aching still in the bottom of his stomach. He flexes out his hands and looks at Harry’s ring on his finger, and wonders if maybe he should call him, but it’s early evening in LA so Harry’s probably out having a brilliant time and doing things that will result in headlines like _North London Hermit Zayn Malik Abandoned By Harlot Husband Harry Styles_. 

There is such a deep and painful heaviness in him as he goes back upstairs that he doesn’t know if he’ll make it to the top, an ache so harsh that he can’t begin to pick it apart enough to identify what it’s made of. Missing having a person beside him as he falls asleep. Missing the soft sound of Harry’s breathing in the dark. Not being as suited to solitude as he’d once thought. He thinks sometimes that he misses being in love. The underlying pain, he realises as he curls up in bed again, is loneliness. He could get out his phone and tweet and talk to sixteen million people immediately, but his house is empty. It’s the most stupid thing in the world. Sometimes he thinks he’ll never be able to put himself together in a way that he understands.

*

Harry shows up the next day at 10am, and Zayn’s still so half asleep when he opens the door that he accidentally leaps on Harry and starts removing his clothes immediately.

“Bloody hell!” Harry says, trying and failing not to sound gratified as he scrambles to slam the door shut behind himself without falling over all his luggage. “What’s this all about?”

“Missed your dick,” Zayn murmurs against his neck. He really did. He missed his dick and his mouth and the smell of his skin and the sound of his laughter and what his hands feel like on Zayn’s skin, and also his stupid, lovely face.

“Oh,” Harry says, hands moving round to grip Zayn’s arse. “Well, that’s nice.”

“Very nice. You know what else is nice?” Zayn says.

“I feel like you’re going to say my dick,” Harry says.

“Arrogant. But correct.” Zayn pulls away and gives Harry a once-over. “You look tired.”

“Thanks. Came here straight from the airport,” Harry explains. “I only landed at seven-thirty.”

“Oh.” Zayn feels ridiculously, stupidly happy that Harry made a beeline for him. “Cool.”

“Had to see my husband,” Harry says, and gives him a smile that’s so bewitchingly fucking beautiful that it makes Zayn want to hit him.

He manages not to. Instead he throws Harry’s jacket over the banister and drags him upstairs. Once he’s done sucking Harry’s dick and then kissing him as Harry gives him a handjob and sticks two fingers up his arse, he asks “So did the paps see you? They’re supposed to see you, right?”

Harry looks nonplussed. “Are they?”

“So they don’t think we’re little shits who don’t care about marriage,” Zayn explains. “So they think we’re in love, or whatever.”

“Oh right.” Harry frowns a bit and then he smiles again, wriggling his eyebrows. “It’s going to be tough for them when they realise we hate each other.”

“Absolutely,” Zayn agrees. For some reason he can’t stop tracing the butterfly tattoo on Harry’s chest. His skin’s so warm and smooth. “Four days until the tour starts again. What do we do, get the lawyers in after that?”

“I suppose so,” Harry says, looking uncomfortable now. “I sometimes feel like we made the wrong decision. Maybe it would have been better to pass it off as a massive joke and say that we were never together. Now it’s just going to look like we – we…”

Like they fell out of love, Zayn wants to say, but does not. Like they’ve split up for real. Like they didn’t like each other as much as they’d thought. He bites his lip. “I know,” he says, although if he’s honest he hadn’t really thought much about it before now. “Listen, maybe for now we should just – I don’t know, we should just…”

Harry’s eyes are on him, his hair tousled and stupid, his gaze so intense that it’s almost unnerving. “Enjoy it,” he says. “We should just enjoy it.”

Zayn kisses him after that, deep and long and sweet. Kisses him until Harry’s stomach rumbles loudly and they break apart and laugh a bit, awkward and smiling still. For some reason Zayn can’t quite look him in the eye.

*

They decide to walk up to the high street to get some food. There are still miraculously no photographers outside Zayn’s house, thank God, and he’s not so bad at blending in, as it happens. Of course, Harry is the worst in the world at it because he lives every second of his life as Harry Pop Star Styles, so they’ll probably get attacked from all angles today. Zayn’s okay with that, he thinks. Maybe it’s for the best. It’s a warm day, and it feels almost bizarre to be walking together in the sunshine. Zayn knows they’re normal people living abnormal lives, but right now it feels like it’s the other way round. Doing things that normal people do sometimes feels like an odd game to him. Walking up to the local shops with a boy he’s been sleeping with feels like something from another possible life that he could have had, if he hadn’t woken up for his audition that day. He smokes two cigarettes on the way, because he feels weirdly nervous, and Harry doesn’t even complain. He does cough a bit though, so Zayn doesn’t light a third. He’s a good husband like that.

They go to Starbucks, because Harry says “Heeeey, frappuccinos,” and loiters at the window until Zayn says, with a little fond exasperation, “Do you want to go in?” They go upstairs with their drinks – Harry orders something with a lot of whipped cream and Zayn has an orange juice, because he still has his pride – to sit on the big dirty purple velvet sofa in the corner. As they’re walking up the stairs, someone takes a picture of them from behind. Zayn considers catapulting himself down the stairs to land furiously on top of whoever it was, but on reflection that’s probably not a good idea. Harry crushes close to him on the sofa, knees bumping against each other’s, linking their arms together. Despite himself, Zayn finds that he doesn’t want to move away in the slightest. There’s something in the way that Harry smiles that he wants to inhale all day.

There are a couple of girls giggling on the other side of the room, which is a pain in the arse. Zayn likes this part of London because it’s not very trendy and it’s a long way away from where the paparazzi habitually hang out, and it’s quite hard for people to flock to if someone tweets about where he is. Even still, getting recognised never gets any less awkward. He nudges Harry, who sighs a bit and then stands up and goes over to them. This is directly against Zayn’s plan of dealing with them, which was essentially to shoot them death glares until they were too afraid of him to comment on anything, and maybe then to camouflage himself slowly with the sofa until he disappeared. Harry’s plan is probably more sensible, he’ll admit that. 

A moment later Harry guides the two girls over to the squashy purple sofa. “This is Emma and this is Becky,” he says.

“Hi, Emma,” Zayn says. “Hi, Becky.” He throws Harry the death glare he was reserving for the girls, but Harry just beams back at him, because he is a relentless monster made only of sunshine and good feelings about things.

Emma looks about she’s about to pass out. Becky might actually be hyperventilating. Sometimes Zayn feels like his life is the most stupid thing in the entire world.

“So,” Harry says brightly. “They asked for a picture, but they’re not going to tweet it for a few hours, are you, girls?”

The girls shake their heads mutely. Zayn manages to muster up a smile for them, and then he feels like a dick, because Christ, they’re what, fourteen? And it’s two-fifteen on a Thursday. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” he asks.

“Zayn is a terrible buzzkill,” Harry explains, and the girls giggle.

Zayn sighs at Harry and gets into position to take selfies with the girls. “I love your music so much,” Emma says, gabbling it out. Her hands are shaking as she puts her phone back into her pocket. “I listen to it all the time. It makes me really happy.”

“Yeah? Thanks, babe.” Even now there’s something brilliant about having created something that can change people’s moods and make their day just a little better.

“And you two are so cute,” Becky says, and then she looks at Emma, and they both giggle.

“We are very cute,” says Harry, with great satisfaction. “He’s cuter than me, though.”

“Shut up,” Zayn says, feeling his ears go pink. 

“Look, he’s blushing,” Harry says. “Cutest boy in the world and he’s all mine.”

“Fucking hell,” Zayn mutters.

“I’m going to stuff him and put him on my mantelpiece,” Harry says with gusto, like he’s just warming up. “I’m going to make him into a teddy bear and sleep with him every night.”

“That’s weird,” says Emma the fan, astutely.

“He’s very weird,” Zayn says. “Stop being such a weird freak, Harry. You’re creeping out these nice girls.”

“I’m going to make a jacket out of his skin,” says Harry ‘Chainsaw Massacre’ Styles.

“Er,” says Zayn. He feels like that escalated quickly. He turns to the girls, who look mildly alarmed. “Could you maybe wait to tweet those pictures?” he asks politely. “Just so we get a bit of time to ourselves before the tour starts up again. Are you girls coming? Listen…” He grabs a napkin off the table. “Write down your names and numbers and email addresses and we’ll sort you some good seats for London, yeah?”

Once they’re done and the girls have dashed off, screaming their way downstairs, and Zayn and Harry are ensconced in their purple sofa again, Harry turns misty eyes on him. “That was really nice of you,” he says.

“So?” Zayn says, feeling uncomfortable. “I _am_ really nice. I’m a fucking angel.”

“It was really, really nice,” Harry says, and puts his arms around Zayn’s waist and starts kissing his cheek. “Really, really lovely.”

“Get the fuck off me,” Zayn says, leaning against Harry’s chest. “You’re making me sick.”

“Really lovely,” Harry says again, nuzzling into Zayn’s neck. “I like it when you’re nice.”

“I’m always nice,” Zayn says, lying.

“Of course,” Harry says diplomatically. He feels so warm and so solid. Zayn could sit tangled up with him forever. “But it’s nice when you’re extra nice.”

“For God’s sake,” Zayn says, wriggling so he’s on Harry’s lap. Another life, where they could do this. Uni students in the campus café, scraping together coppers for coffee. Busking after lectures, maybe. Do people do that? He has no idea what people do. Uni students living normal lives and complaining about having to read Chaucer and kissing after class and going to house parties together and giving each other blowjobs in the student union toilets. Harry’s arms are still around him. “You’re so annoying,” Zayn tells him, and bends his head to kiss him, chasing the whipped cream chocolate taste off his tongue, until someone else comes up the stairs.

*

Harry stays over that night. They make dinner together – mostly Harry, if Zayn’s honest, but it’s more because Harry gets weirdly proprietal whenever he’s in a kitchen – and lie on the sofa together. They watch Avengers Assemble and Harry falls asleep and Zayn does his best not to get huffy with him over it even though Avengers should be honoured at all times, and then they go upstairs and Zayn fucks him hard. It’s a marked change from falling asleep alone the previous night; really it isn’t so bad. The next morning Harry leaves again, and goes up to Cheshire to spend some time with his mum. He looks at Zayn tentatively and says “You could…” and Zayn says, “Nah,” and Harry says more quietly, “Yeah, of course. No worries.”

Harry comes back to London two days later without telling him, and then he goes out and gets photographed holding Daisy Lowe’s hand, which is fine. It’s also understandable, because Daisy Lowe is extremely beautiful and also, from what Zayn’s heard, one of the nicest girls on the London party circuit. Zayn gets about a hundred thousand tweets about it, but honestly he’s fine. He tweets ‘Lol … !’ along with the ghost emoji to demonstrate his absolute fineness, but no one seems to get it.

He rings Louis and makes noncommittal noises at him until Louis huffs exasperatedly and jogs the seven minutes – they’ve counted – down the road to Zayn’s house. He turns up sweaty and out of breath, because the two of them like McDonald’s a lot more than treadmills. Then he leans limply against Zayn’s kitchen sink complaining about how much pain he’s in and what a wonderful friend he is until Zayn hands him a cup of tea and a packet of chocolate Hobnobs. Then he seems to recover and says “Is this about those Daisy pictures?”

“What? No,” Zayn says. “I just thought we should hang out. Play some games. Have you got any weed?”

Louis gives him a dark look. “Number one, I always have weed. I am the marijuana master.” Zayn knows that’s not true, but he’ll let Louis have it. “Number two,” Louis continues, “you’re doing your ‘Wah, wah, I’m Zayn and I’m so sad, wah, wah, Harry’s being mean to me’ face, and I categorically will not stand for it.”

“I definitely don’t have one of those faces,” Zayn says, doing his best to be polite and probably failing.

“You’re doing it right now,” Louis says. 

When Zayn’s in the middle of rolling his eyes at Louis he catches a glimpse of his own reflection on the side of his stainless steel toaster. Actually, his face does look a bit strange. “Shut up,” he tells Louis, considering taking the Hobnobs back and throwing them away just to spite him. Louis licks chocolate off his fingertips and wriggles his eyebrows irritatingly. “It is a bit weird though, seeing those pictures.”

Louis narrows his eyes. “You said yourself you’re just having a bit of fun with him, Zayn.”

“I know.” Zayn does know that, and it’s stupid and irritating of Louis to remind him of it.

“So in conclusion,” Louis announces, “you should stop being a dick. Have you seen him lately?”

“He came over when he got home from LA,” Zayn tells him. “Stayed the night.”

“Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more,” Louis says, laughing. “Is it really just fun?”

“It’s not fun at all,” Zayn says. He doesn’t know how honest he’s being.

“The sex must be fun,” Louis points out.

“The sex is blinding,” Zayn agrees. “But everyone’s watching. I hate that.”

“You got married in Vegas,” Louis says. “You have to wait it out until things get normal.”

“We’ll be divorced by then,” Zayn tells him. The idea of it makes him feel weirdly gloomy.

“Maybe,” Louis says cryptically, and then sighs. “You do know he doesn’t give a shit about Daisy Lowe, don’t you? Well, they’re friends obviously, but that’s it.”

“I don’t really care,” Zayn lies.

“You’re the most emotionally constipated person I’ve ever met,” Louis says. “It’s like I can see what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it, but then every time I talk to you about it it’s like hitting a brick wall.”

“Thanks,” Zayn says, feeling oddly wounded at that. “Just what I needed to hear.”

Louis shrugs, eyes wide and unconcerned as he starts eating another Hobnob. “Well, there are two of you in this marriage and you’re both my concern. Don’t worry, I’ll also be telling Harry that he’s a massive wimp.”

“Is he?” Zayn asks.

“Absolutely,” Louis says, with certainty. 

“Why?”

“Think about it, you total tit.”

Zayn does, and comes up with absolutely nothing. He shrugs. Louis sighs at him, which is becoming a far more regular occurrence than Zayn would like. “Listen, it doesn’t matter. I’ll get Liam to talk to you next time. Let’s have a beer. Just…” He seems to be groping for words, which is new for him. “Don’t fuck it up, all right? Remember that Harry’s a delicate little flower.”

Zayn accidentally snorts out a laugh. “Sure he is.”

“For God’s sake, Zayn.” Louis looks irritated for a second before visibly calming himself down. “Look. As I said, let’s have a beer. And then we can spend a few hours not talking about Harry fucking Styles, okay?”

Zayn nods and shrugs, even though he feels like that might be harder than it sounds.

*

The fact that this is their last UK and Ireland tour for the foreseeable future feels completely insane. They’ve cut down on dates this time round, which is a relief, but it means that tickets were apparently pretty hard to get, and Zayn feels bad for the fans who missed out. Even still, most of the reviews for this tour have used words like ‘exhausted’ and ‘ageing’ and ‘man band’, so he doesn’t think they’re missing out on much. They kick it off in Manchester, and when Harry puts his arms around Zayn and smudges kisses onto his cheek during Liam’s solo in _18_ , Zayn feels himself smile, bright and wide. Then Harry makes him dance with him during _Girl Almighty_ , makes him spin under Harry’s arm, and it’s – the lights, and the screaming, and the brightness of Harry’s face. It’s something. That’s all.

In the hotel afterwards Harry follows him into his room and pushes him down onto the bed. He takes off Zayn’s boots for him, in a tender way that makes Zayn’s chest constrict a little, and touches the screw tattoo on his ankle. He peels off his socks, even though Zayn says “It’s very dangerous territory, getting that close to the feet after a long sweaty show,” and Harry just laughs at him. Zayn twists out of his jeans and pants and t-shirt, and Harry settles between his legs, his jeans rough on Zayn’s thighs, shoulders broad underneath his still-sweaty shirt. He kisses Zayn’s neck and his chest, and the lip tattoo on his clavicle, and edges his teeth over his nipples. He makes him shudder when he kisses his stomach, the faint scratch of his barely-there stubble, and kisses the line of Zayn’s hip, and lower too: where his leg meets his groin, before lowering his mouth down over Zayn’s cock, a long graceful decisive movement, somehow taking him in right to the base and sucking hard before pulling back, wrapping a hand around him. 

“I love your dick,” he says, looking up at Zayn, a little breathless. “I love that you’re thick. I love that when you fuck me it fills me up and when you fuck me hard I can feel it the next day. I love the way you taste. I love swallowing for you. You know I’d do anything you want, right?”

Zayn thinks of all the stuff he loves that he doesn’t talk about, but it’s not a surprise that Harry would do all of it. They’re good at switching off for each other. Always were. Even when they brought a girl back to their room they were good at changing it up night to night. Zayn in her mouth, Harry in her cunt. Harry in her mouth, Zayn in her arse. Her on her knees, mouth stretched around two cocks, Harry and Zayn’s mouths inches from each other. He thinks that’s probably where it all started: the night they realised they didn’t need a girl bridging the space between them.

He wants to get laid in a public space, like the time Perrie wore no knickers and sank down onto his cock under a tree in the park. He wants to see what it’s like for Harry to press his hand down on his throat, slow and steady. He always liked it when he ended up with scratches down his back after sex; he wants to see if that’s a thing, if that goes anywhere else. He thinks he could do all those things with Harry, probably. He thinks they could do whatever they want together, but God, they’ve got so little time together.

“I know,” he says, and touches the side of Harry’s face. He was engaged for years and yet he still doesn’t feel like he always knows how to show affection. His hand feels awkward and clumsy but Harry presses his face into it anyway, turns his head to kiss Zayn’s palm before taking Zayn’s cock into his mouth again. Fuck, the tightness of his mouth, the wetness, the enthusiasm he does everything with, especially this, eyes closed like he’s communing with the gods. Afterwards Zayn kisses him even though he’s never really liked tasting his own come, before pulling Harry’s clothes off, slow and almost lazy, Harry tense and desperate by the end, and as Zayn sinks down onto Harry’s cock he reaches out for him, runs half-shaking hands over Zayn’s stomach and chest. It’s familiar enough now that Zayn can enjoy it perfectly and ignore the slight cramping in his legs as he rides him. It’s only after Harry’s come, gasping out swearwords, that Zayn realises they didn’t use a condom. He feels wetter than usual, but fuck it. He kind of likes it. 

“Bloody hell,” Harry murmurs, reaching out for him, and Zayn goes obediently, resting on him, pushing Harry’s hair off his forehead, fingers dancing over the faint freckles on his collarbone. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever get tired of touching him. “Fuck, Zayn,” Harry breathes. “Do you ever think that married sex is better than single sex?”

Zayn laughs. He has to, he can’t help it, it’s ridiculous. Harry is ridiculous and everything is so stupid, and nothing is more real than this affection Zayn has for him, burning away like a candle inside his chest. “I think you might be right,” he agrees, and nudges the tip of Harry’s nose with his own.

*

The UK leg of the tour is both extremely bizarre and his favourite ever. They’re not too far from home, and there’s an end point that he can feel that’s keeping him going, and his mum and sisters and cousins come to see them in Sheffield, which is brilliant. He sees Waliyha talking to Harry in the green room after the show, laughing at something he’s said, and Zayn thinks that maybe he should go over and separate them and shut Harry up, but somehow he doesn’t want to. They look happy, and that’s nice. They both know the score. That’s enough.

The five of them, Zayn and his boys, they all spend a lot of time together. It’s not a decision that they say aloud, but Zayn’s conscious that time is starting to run out. They have a future together somewhere down the line, but right now they’re drawing to a temporary close, and he wants to make the most of it while they’re still there. The sand level in the hourglass of their bizarre lives together is running low and he thinks that their energy would be too, if it wasn’t for the certainty of a break at the end. It’s a relief that they’re not writing and recording while touring, it’s a relief that they haven’t got another tour full of sold out stadiums after this. It’s a relief that he can go home and regroup and try to figure out what sort of a person he might be if none of this had ever happened, but in the meantime he wants to make the most of his boys.

So they hang out together on the tour bus. They play video games and share pizzas and Harry lights scented candles and gets roundly mocked by everyone else. They spend time in the same dressing room before each show, and they spend the aftershow parties together too, downing rounds of shots and dancing, and finally at the end of the evening Zayn falls into bed with Harry. The stories in the papers are dying down a little, getting used to the fact that they’re somehow married, and Zayn starts to creep back into his mentions on Twitter again. They’re positive, largely. A few things about gay Muslims that he doesn’t really care for, but other than that it’s fine. He sends out a lot of happy tweets, because that’s how he feels, and a few selfies that people seem to like. A selfie of him and Harry smiling together, which people seem to love. Perrie texts him to tell him she knew he always had a thing for Harry, along with four winky face emojis, and he feels so awkward at that that it takes him a day to text her back, but it’s fine. Somehow, everything is good. He doesn’t understand it, but it’s working.

They go to Birmingham, where he and Harry argue about absolutely nothing before the show and make up afterwards, Zayn pressing him against the wall backstage and kissing him slowly as members of the tech team pass quietly by. They party in Dublin and Niall drinks nine pints of Guinness and somehow doesn’t die, and in Cardiff on one of their days off Harry decides he wants to go to the beach so Zayn goes with him, so they drive for half an hour to Barry Island, and buy chips and ice cream by the water. It’s not warm but they take off their shoes and splash along the shoreline anyway, hands entwined. The sun is setting, red and pink and purple jetting across the sky like in a storybook. Days like that, Zayn almost forgets that he and Harry are hardly real.

They have five days off at the end of the second week. They finish their second Cardiff gig and split up, Liam falling into the back of a car with Sophia, Niall getting on a plane to Dublin so he can go to his dad’s birthday party, Louis waiting in the back of a van for Zayn so they can go back to London together. Harry is as ever an enigma, tilting his head to one side. “You definitely have to get back?” he asks, and Zayn smiles, slow and deliberate, and tells him, “Babe, I don’t _have_ to do anything. I’m a free man.”

“I don’t think Zayn’s getting in the car,” Louis reports to the driver, and shoots Zayn a withering look.

As it turns out, Louis is right: Zayn doesn’t get in the car. Instead he gets on a plane, and he and Harry go to Ibiza together. Somehow there’s a villa ready for them with a short stretch of private beach behind it. The ocean is so bright it’s blinding, the sun almost painfully high in the sky. They go clubbing on the first night and then the second night too, and on the third night they’re too busy watching Ratatouille and eating pasta and having sex. During the day they lie out on sunloungers by their glittering blue pool and Zayn watches as Harry’s skin goes through the stages of sunburn: pink, peeling, rosy, tan. He rubs sun cream over Harry’s shoulders and gets it in his hair by mistake, and later they go to the market nearby to buy fresh tomatoes and bread and cheese and anything that Harry deems to be ‘interesting’. Zayn firmly stays away from the sardines.

It’s a bit like heaven, if he’s honest. He’s still not the greatest swimmer in the world but he gets in the pool obviously, and he goes into the sea up to his waist. He doesn’t like going in much deeper than his bellybutton or putting his head under, but Harry coaxes him out further with that electric smile of his, and somehow five minutes later Zayn’s floating on his back, squinting against the bright high sun, Harry splashing around somewhere to his right. The waves are gentle and he feels himself drift, tries not to move, tries to let the water carry him, and then there’s a bigger wave and he chokes, panic flooding through his body as he jolts upright, the sand further from his feet than he’d thought. Salt water floods up his nose and he snorts it out and retches a little, and then Harry’s there, arms around him, not rescuing him because Zayn doesn’t need that. Emphatically, he’s fine. He could make it to the shore by himself, he knows that despite the adrenaline in his veins, but it’s good to have Harry there buoying him up, his arms a lifeline around Zayn’s waist and his broad chest a raft. In his ear Harry says, low, “It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re all right. I’m here. I’ve got you.”

*

Back in the UK, the weather is grey and they have another eight shows to do. Glasgow, Glasgow, Newcastle, Newcastle, an extra Manchester date, and then London times three. There are another twelve days left until the tour is over, and pushing himself back into real life after four days in the sun with Harry is almost too much. He feels dazed and dizzy when they pop up on stage in Glasgow and he almost misses a couple of his cues. Harry grabs his wrist a few times, smiles at him as he frowns into his eyes, and it’s good, it’s steadying. Liam slings an arm around his shoulders and it feels like an anchor, as Louis and Niall throw him protective glances from across the stage. 

Afterwards they crowd into Louis’s suite and clean out the minibar. When they’re halfway down a bottle of extremely expensive brandy that Liam’s produced from somewhere, Niall says cheerfully, “So how’s the divorce going, lads?”

“Er,” Harry says, and then starts choking on a peanut, probably deliberately so he doesn’t have to answer.

“We haven’t thought too much about it,” Zayn says helpfully over Harry’s coughing. “We’re going to sort that out after the tour, aren’t we, babe?” He touches the bottom of Harry’s back.

Harry nods, teary-eyed, and starts glugging the cup of water that Liam’s run to get him. “Yeah. There’s plenty of time to decide. And anyway, it doesn’t look great if we get divorced this fast, does it?”

“That’s true,” Louis says. “May as well wait until next year. May as well wait until the year after that, actually. What’s the point of ever getting divorced at all? Maybe you should stay married forever.”

Zayn only catches the tail end of the dirty look Liam throws Louis, but it’s much appreciated. “Well, we’re not… we didn’t decide to do it really, it wasn’t exactly a marriage undertaken with much thought, was it,” he says lamely. Harry seems to be staring intensely at a pattern on the carpet, which is singularly unhelpful. “Like it’s not like getting married was a conscious decision? And you can only do things for so long to appease people, right, Harry?”

“Mmmm,” Harry says, probably still focusing on not coughing up his trachea. 

It hurts a bit, actually, talking about this stuff. More than Zayn would have predicted. But the other lads are still looking at him thoughtfully, so he presses on. “I think it looks better if we at least pretend we got married because we were in love,” he says.

“But you’re not,” Niall says, like he’s testing him. Zayn rolls his eyes at him. “It’s clever of you to fake it by going on holiday and stuff though,” Niall carries on.

Zayn feels like someone’s taken a scoop out of his chest at that. “That wasn’t – I don’t know if you could call that _fake_ ,” he mumbles, thinking of Harry in the Ibiza sunlight, his sleepy green eyes across white pillows first thing in the morning, cutting bread for lunch and almost getting his finger and dropping the knife and laughing. Orange juice, fresh pastries, avocados, Harry making his mum’s spag bol for dinner. Harry snorting at things he’d found online, reading out awful jokes that had made Zayn laugh despite himself. The headline when someone had got a picture of them landing at Heathrow: ‘The Look of Love’, with a picture of the two of them smiling sideways at each other next to their taxi outside. They’ve got headlines wrong so many times before. Zayn feels like such a dopey shit for listening to them this time.

Over him, Harry cuts in, sounding unconcerned, “Yeah, it wasn’t a bad idea, right? It was a nice few days too. Love a bit of proper sunlight.” He stands up and stretches. “I’m knackered. Bed for me.”

For some reason he doesn’t ask Zayn to come with him, doesn’t give him that look that Zayn’s come to recognise as saying ‘Follow me. Sex now, please’. He just wanders out, letting the door click shut behind him, and it’s whatever. It’s fine. Zayn pretends not to notice the way that the others are looking at each other as he pours himself a new drink. 

In the end, he winds up getting catastrophically drunk with Louis and pounding on Harry’s hotel room door at half three. He doesn’t remember much else until he wakes up the next morning with a churning stomach and a blinding headache and Harry smiling down at him, all lightly muscled and shirtless and effortlessly gorgeous. “I’m dying,” Zayn tells him, heartfelt, and Harry passes him a handful of pills and a bottle of water before lying down beside him and stroking his hair with cool, gentle hands as he falls asleep again.

*

The tour winds down. Glasgow is gone and then Newcastle is gone, and then there’s only Manchester left before they leave the world of hotel rooms behind and fall back into London. These days of being with Harry are ticking away, these days with his boys. Zayn thinks that mourning for something that isn’t over yet probably isn’t the smartest thing he’s ever done, but it isn’t like he can help it. It’s a relief, too, that’s one thing he’s sure of. There were days when he hated it. He’s looking forward to retiring the ‘y’ from his first name.

Harry’s mum and stepdad come to the Manchester show, which is both nice and a little awkward because technically they’re his inlaws, and he feels very strange about that. When he first sees them he has a moment of extreme anxiety and stands with his back against the wall and his eyes fixed firmly on the beer in his hand, until Louis comes up to him and hisses “Have you actually gone mental?” in his ear.

“Er,” Zayn says. “No? I don’t think so?”

“Anne keeps looking at you.” Louis nudges him lightly in the ribs. “Probably because you keep sticking it in her son and then not making eye contact with anyone.”

Zayn doesn’t feel like that paints a very positive picture of him. “I don’t stick it in her son in front of her,” he says, with as much dignity as he can muster. “Technically she doesn’t know that—”

“Stop being such a dick,” Louis says gently, before shoving him not-so-gently forward. Zayn reclaims his balance and shoots a look that says ‘I will kill you slowly’ over his shoulder at Louis, who’s having a brilliant time laughing to himself.

It takes him a moment to approach Anne, who’s collecting a glass of wine from the drinks table. Lucky for him she notices he’s there before he has the chance to either lurk silently next to her for a creepy amount of time or decide he’s too afraid to talk to her and run away. She gives him a smile that’s way too reminiscent of Harry’s before reaching out to hug him. “It’s so lovely to see you!” she says, probably just being polite.

He manages not to say “Is it? Is it really?” in a sarky voice. Instead he says “You too,” and lets her hug him again. “Sorry, I meant to talk to you before, or ring, or come to the house, or…” He’s lying, obviously, and hopes it doesn’t show.

“Oh darling, that’s fine.” She waves a hand, as if it’s all in the past. Anne is far too nice, Zayn realises, like her son. “You boys have been busy. Harry said we wouldn’t see you for a while. He told me it was all a little…” She pauses, as though she’s looking for the right word. “Impromptu,” she settles on. “So I didn’t know if we’d see you at all.”

Zayn’s stomach does a strange swooping thing, and ends up somewhere around his toes. “Sorry,” he says dully.

“Don’t say sorry.” Anne squeezes his elbow with a small smile, as though they’ve got a secret. Usually Zayn hates people touching him randomly like that, but he doesn’t mind so much with her. There’s a sort of warmth coming from her, which Harry has too. He likes it in both of them. It makes him feel as though they’re good, healthy people to be around. “Life’s funny. You do things that might seem like mistakes on the surface but that doesn’t mean they won’t lead you to the right places in the end.”

Possibly, Zayn surmises, Anne is a wise and mystical hedgewitch. “What do you mean?” he asks. 

“Harry’s father wasn’t necessarily the man I should have decided to spend my life with,” Anne says, and shrugs a little, as though it’s not of much concern to her now. “But I learned from it. That it’s okay to want more from your life, and to take it. And you know he gave me two children, and they’re both brilliant. Did Harry ever tell you about the time we lived over a pub?” Zayn nods. It’s one of those things that Harry jokes about sometimes, with an oddly jagged edge in his voice. “That wasn’t ideal either. But it taught me determination, resilience, how to make do with not much. I learned.” She shrugs philosophically. “I don’t want you boys to make mistakes, but I understand that you have to, in order to move forward.”

“So you’re not worried that me and him might end up…” Zayn tries to ask. He feels exposed, as though the top layer of his skin has been abruptly ripped away.

“I’m worried about him. He’s my son,” Anne points out. “But I think I was always more worried about him not taking chances. Doing something is always better than doing nothing. What do you think?”

“You’re probably right,” Zayn says. He glances across the room, and somehow finds Harry. Harry tilts his head to the side and narrows his eyes in a faintly curious way. _You okay_? his face asks, and Zayn nods slightly, lets the corner of his lips rise in a small smile. “I just don’t want to mess anything up.”

“You won’t,” Anne says. Apparently she has a lot more faith in him than he does in himself. “And for the record, I think you’d be a lovely son in law.” She smiles at him again before leaning in to kiss his cheek and moving away across the room. He sees her appear by Robin’s side a moment later, watches him incline his head and laugh fondly at what she’s saying, and he thinks of his own mum and dad. The cracks in their relationship that only appeared after Zayn accidentally got famous and had millions pushed into his bank account and his dad realised that he hated everything to do with that world, and his mum realised that she loved nice handbags and the occasional treat. The way that they look at each other despite those differences. He wants that some day. God, he wants it. He thinks of that lonely night in his stupid big glass-walled house and thinks, _Never again._

He grabs another beer and cracks it open, takes a long sip of it. When he’s done Harry’s somehow by his side, giving him a smile that’s so warm it makes Zayn want to fold himself up in his arms. “I hope my mum wasn’t giving you too much grief,” he says. 

“She’s nice,” Zayn says. “So are you.”

“I am, aren’t I?” Harry grins. He puts a hand on Zayn’s waist, and leans down to kiss him, even though everyone in the room knows them, even though here they have nothing to hide and no pretences to uphold. Zayn kisses him back, runs his hand up Harry’s arm and over the line of his shoulder. It’s the only thing in the world he wants to do.

*

In London, Harry stays at his house by silent mutual consent. He flings his suitcases down in a corner of Zayn’s room and puts his cowboy hat on the bedpost and starts wandering around his garden and picking weeds out of the flowerbeds. Really, it’s not so bad. They wake up together, and eat breakfast together, and get picked up to go to the O2 together, and if it wasn’t for the swarm of photographers who’ve realised that Harry’s staying at his house, Zayn thinks it might feel almost normal.

The last three concerts feel like an epic countdown to years of freedom. Friday is brilliant. The crowd’s energy is infectious and Zayn manages to make his voice sound better than usual, wider somehow, and after the show the five of them cling together, sweaty and breathless and laughing with joy. Sometimes it’s a surprise to find out how little’s changed since he accidentally married Harry; he still spends half an hour chilling and chatting with Liam in the afternoon, Louis still drags him out for a cigarette every fifteen minutes, Niall still shows him some chords on the guitar that he forgets three minutes later. Except now there’s Harry drifting around like an ungainly butterfly, there’s the soft touch of his fingers across Zayn’s shoulders every now and then like a brief hello. There’s someone to turn to, if he needs to. Harry’s legally bound to listen to his shit. He likes it.

Saturday’s amazing too, but afterwards Niall tears up a bit and then shakes his head firmly and says “Fuck!” and does two laps of the corridors backstage to cheer himself up. Harry vanishes after him and Liam goes to find Sophia and Louis raises his eyebrows at Zayn and says, “One more to go.”

“And then the announcement on Monday,” Zayn says. First thing Monday, announcing their indefinite hiatus. He hopes the Samaritans have been alerted.

“You’re coming to the press conference, yeah?” Louis asks.

“Course. We all are,” Zayn says self-righteously, even though he knows he’s not always been amazing at turning up to things in the past.

Louis sighs at him. “Right. And then what?”

“You mean with Harry?” The idea of what might happen with Harry after Monday is something that Zayn has been studiously not thinking about.

“I mean with everything,” Louis says.

Zayn blinks at him and sighs a bit. “I might have a little break.”

“You need to find things to do,” Louis says, leaning against Zayn’s side and slinging an arm around his shoulders. “Find a hobby.”

“I’ve got plenty of hobbies.” The only ones he can think of are drawing and rolling really excellent joints.

“Spray painting your own house doesn’t count as a hobby,” Louis says, and when Zayn starts to make protesting noises he says “Shut up! Art itself is a hobby, of course. You should get some canvases. Set up an auction with a charity or something.”

“Huh,” Zayn says. It doesn’t sound like a horrible idea. Fans would probably buy his art for fifty quid a piece or something. He imagines a hundred fans buying pictures, and presenting a cheque to the British Asian Trust for five grand. He likes it.

“I have the best ideas in the world,” Louis says with some glee.

“You’re all right sometimes,” Zayn allows. “Also, I’m going to start recording soon.”

“With Shahid?” Louis wrinkles his nose.

“Why do you hate him so much?”

“Other than the fact he’s a knob?” 

“Your mum’s a knob,” Zayn tells him, and Louis starts trying to put him in a headlock while shouting “He’s a grown man who calls himself Naughty Boy! He’s ruined so much porn for me!”

Luckily the others arrive back and Harry comes to rescue him, giving Louis dark glances and trying to gently karate chop his hands off Zayn. “Stop trying to hurt my husband,” he says strictly, wrapping Zayn up in his arms, and Zayn lets himself be held against Harry and smirks over at Louis. Having someone automatically on his side seems like something he could get used to.

*

It’s the best and worst show of Zayn’s life. He feels himself tearing up about five times, which is completely ridiculous because it isn’t actually the end. It just feels like it is. _Don’t Forget Where You Belong_ seems like a big deal for all of them; Harry jogs down the runway towards him during Niall’s solo and puts his arms around his waist, face pressed into the crook of Zayn’s neck, and Zayn strokes his hair and looks upward into the lights, the cavernous room lined with bright faces there just for them. Sometimes he thinks he’ll miss this. Liam’s voice cracks on the last notes and they all gather together, even though they don’t usually do that at the end of that particular song. It’s good to have Niall’s arm over his back and Liam’s hair tickling the side of his face. It’s good to be here with his boys.

“This time next year,” he says to the others, and Louis shouts, “What?” and Zayn says, more loudly now over the screaming, “This time next year!” 

The others look at him uncomprehendingly except for Harry, who knows somehow – he always knows. He always gets it. He looks at Zayn and nods and smiles and tucks an arm around him as the others scatter. “This time next year,” he murmurs into Zayn’s ear, and somehow that’s enough.

He’s aching by the time they get to Best Song Ever, which has been resolutely at the end of their setlist for years now. It’s bizarre he gets to sing the last few words in it, that his is the last singing voice that the world will hear from One Direction for the time being. It’s bizarre it’s all ending. There’s going to be a lot of sad gifs of this moment. He sings, “It was the best song ever,” and thinks, _Fuck. We had the best time ever_ , and then he shouts, “Thank you, London, we love you lots,” like he’s a stupid rock star cliché, and they all run up to the back of the stage together. 

They stand together, Louis’s arm looped around his shoulders and Niall’s arm around his waist. His boys, his four brothers. His three brothers, more like, and his husband too. His love, maybe. Thanks, Vegas. Thanks, everything. “Thank you so much for everything, you’ve been really beautiful,” Harry says, lights dancing overhead, camera flashes going off. He watches Harry’s throat constrict, and then he says, “And we were One Direction.”

*

Afterwards they come home to Zayn’s house, and they all sleep on the living room floor, like they’re kids at Harry’s stepdad’s house again, with absolutely no idea that their lives are going to be turned upside down. They drag the sofa cushions onto the ground and Zayn brings down a futon and his duvet and a pile of sleeping bags, and they crack open some beers and commandeer all the snacks he has in his cupboards. 

“I can’t believe this is it,” he says, not for the first time. “Everyone’s going to go mad.”

“Won’t be all that much different from usual,” Liam says, ripping open some Haribo with gusto.

“Are you sad?” Louis asks them, looking round the circle. Liam’s leaning against the sofa, Niall’s sprawled out on his stomach, Louis is cross-legged like a child in school assembly. Harry’s head is in Zayn’s lap. Zayn tenderly feeds him a gummy bear and Harry kisses his fingertips.

“Quite sad,” Liam says. “And also, at the same time, not?”

“Yeah.” Niall clears his throat. “It doesn’t feel all that permanent, so it’s not too tragic.”

“That was what I said on stage,” Zayn says. “Come back together in a year and see how we feel. If it’s a no go, come back together the year after that. Keep going and then one day we’ll all be in the same place at the same time and something might just happen.”

“That’s a really good idea,” Harry says approvingly, and Zayn pats his cheek and puts another gummy bear on his lips.

“I think that’s a good idea too,” Louis says. “But you lot can come over sometimes, yeah? Pizza and video games and whatever.”

Zayn isn’t sure they know how to hang out like normal people now, without timetables and places to be and walls of screaming fans outside. Instead of pointing that out, he says, “I’m always over at your house.”

“Yeah, but you’re practically stalking me,” Louis says. Zayn rolls his eyes at him, but Louis carries on, “You’re desperate for me. I meant all five of us should still spend time together, not just Zayn the creepy stalker weirdo.”

Liam holds up his right arm and touches the four chevrons there with his left hand. “Any time,” he says.

“Whenever I’m around,” Niall agrees.

“I might be in LA sometimes,” Harry says. “But I mean, sure. Yeah. When I’m home.”

Zayn was considering stroking Harry’s hair, but he’s not so sure he feels like doing that now. He moves the gummy bears away. “Heeeey,” Harry says, and Zayn pretends not to notice.

Louis sneaks Zayn a quick look and then he asks Harry, “What are you in LA for?”

“Meetings,” Harry says vaguely. He heaves himself up and opens a tub of possibly out of date marshmallows that used to belong to Perrie. “Can we play chubby bunny?”

“No,” Liam says sternly. “You might die.”

“I like cheating death,” Harry says brightly. “I’m not afraid.”

“That’s one way to get me out of this godforsaken marriage,” Zayn says. He means it as a joke, but his voice comes out flatter than he intended. Harry turns around and gives him a hurt look.

“You can always sue for abandonment once Harry fucks off to America,” Louis says, clearly trying to lighten the mood. “Oi, Niall, catch!” He starts throwing jelly beans at Niall’s face at an alarmingly rapid pace, and Niall opens his mouth agreeably.

*

They wake up in a tangle, too early in the morning as the sun hits Zayn’s living room. He wakes encircled in Harry’s arms, his breath low and even on the back of Zayn’s neck, and Zayn twists around so he can face him. “Morning,” he says, in a soft voice, and Harry opens his eyes slowly, slowly.

“Oh,” he says, and presses the tip of his nose against Zayn’s, and twines their legs together. “Morning.” He tightens his arms around him and tucks his face into the curve of Zayn’s neck, letting out a satisfied breath. He smells morning-stale and sweet-sleepy, and Zayn drags his fingers gently through his hair. 

From the futon, Liam’s smiling reluctantly over at them. “You two are so gross,” he says quietly, and Zayn smiles over at him, feeling loose-limbed and happy and free.

Louis wakes up next, which means that Niall and Harry are forced to wake up because he starts clattering around complaining that Zayn hasn’t got any bacon – “He doesn’t eat it,” Harry says, and Louis says, “Yes, but _still_ , always be prepared, Zayn, you’ll never make it in the Boy Scouts at this rate,” – and pouring himself a bowl of cereal. Outside the house there’s a siege of photographers – that’s the collective noun, Zayn decided long ago, although ‘rabble’ and ‘horror’ were also up there – but that’s fairly normal. The five of them take turns in the shower, get changed and attempt to make themselves look like handsome boyish pop stars instead of sleep-deprived idiots in their mid-twenties with mild hangovers. They take two cars, smoking and non-smoking, and Liam and Louis are quiet and tired-looking in the seats next to Zayn. He scrolls through Tumblr on his phone and finds some fan art of him and Harry, next to a photo of them from what he thinks is the previous night onstage. He screencaps it and tweets it, saying ‘Cute’ with a kissy-face emoji. Keep the façade up, that’s it. Keep it all going until they don’t have to any more. It gets retweeted forty thousand times in five minutes. His life is sincerely ridiculous. 

In the press conference, Louis is the one who does the speaking, because that’s his job and he’s good at it. He always has been good at it, right from when they were on the X Factor and he was the only one brave and sensible enough to do it. He always knows what to say, and how to make it sound sincere even though he’s frequently dreadful in most other aspects of their lives. If Zayn had to tell the world they were going on an indefinite hiatus, he’d probably make it sound like it was in sarcastic quotation marks. Louis sounds honest, and a little sad and world-weary, but certain and mature too. “These four boys are my best friends,” he says at the end, looking carefully down the camera lens. “That’ll never change. This is not the end of One Direction.”

It still feels like an end as they peel away to their separate houses, Liam and Louis and Niall falling into taxis until finally there’s only Harry and Zayn left. “What now?” Harry asks finally, sounding lost.

“I don’t know,” Zayn says. He looks at the pink line of Harry’s mouth, his dark lashes and his green eyes. The sweetness of him, the softness despite the hard muscles of his arms and chest. It’s going to be hard to give him up. “All your stuff’s at my house. You’ll need it, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Harry says. “I suppose so.” There’s a little awkwardness there, and the words hang between them in the taxi, even as Harry picks up Zayn’s left hand and starts tracing the tattoo over his knuckles with a gentle fingertip. Zayn’s chest is already aching when they get back to the house and have to drive through a wall of photographers to get inside. The living room is full of the detritus of the night before, which makes it seem sadder, somehow. Tonight he’ll be on his own, pottering around, tidying up, filling up the dishwasher. He doesn’t fancy that much.

“So you’re going away soon?” he asks Harry, and Harry shrugs a shoulder.

“LA,” he says simply, “like I said before.”

“Right.” Zayn realises suddenly that he’s touching the ring on his left hand, Harry’s ring. He can see his star and moon on Harry’s finger. It seems like a million years ago that he gave it to him. “So we need to – we need to figure this out soon, I suppose.”

“I suppose so.” Harry’s not making eye contact, which is fucking annoying.

“I’ll talk to my lawyers,” Zayn says, at a loss for anything else. 

“Me too.” Harry’s still staring hard at the floor just next to Zayn’s feet.

“The thing is,” Zayn says, “I don’t – obviously we don’t want this. Right?” The ache in his chest is intensifying.

“Right,” Harry says, and looks up finally, making eye contact with him. “We don’t want this. We don’t want to be married to each other.”

“I don’t want to be married to anyone,” Zayn says. “The band’s over—”

“On hiatus,” Harry says.

“What the fuck ever,” Zayn snaps, and then hates himself a bit when Harry’s face falls. “Like I said, I’ll talk to my lawyers and get us out of this fucking mess.”

Harry’s grimacing, like he hurts a bit. Zayn knows the feeling, but if they were supposed to be together he’s pretty sure it would have happened years ago. He’s pretty sure that Harry would have fought for it. He’s pretty sure that Harry would be fighting for it right now, but instead Harry just shrugs again and says, “Fine.”

He leaves later that day, once he’s packed up his stuff and called a car. He puts on his stupid cowboy hat and ducks out of Zayn’s front door, bags in his hands, and then it’s as though he was never there to begin with.

*

Things are fine. People seem to think they’re not, but Zayn is really and sincerely fine. He goes to the studio with Shahid and records a guest appearance for one of his new tracks, which is fun. He’s supposed to be writing his own stuff, but it isn’t working too well. He can hang over Shahid’s shoulder and tell him if a beat isn’t working or if there’s a touch too much autotuning, but that’s the extent of Zayn’s creative capabilities right now. He thinks about lyrics he’d like to try to write but all he can think of is Harry sunburnt and smiling on a sunlounger in Ibiza, or Harry messy-haired and fast asleep across crumpled white sheets, or even vague snatches of Harry drunk and beaming in a casino, what feels like a million years ago now. He doesn’t talk to his lawyers, and he doesn’t know if Harry does either. He certainly doesn’t get any letters about their upcoming divorce. And he’s fine with that.

The newspapers speculate, because of course they do. Perrie texts him and says ‘Alright baba, you by yourself then? Xx’ which means everyone knows that Harry flew to LA and left him in London as soon as he could after the press conference. He just sends her back a selfie of himself in the back garden with the sun behind his head, smiling with his tongue stuck out, and she seems satisfied with that. There’s a dull exhaustion tugging in his heart, post-tour fatigue, post-band grief for a part of his life that’s over for the time being at least. Liam comes over and they go to the new Avengers film together, and he admits that he’s thinking about proposing to Sophia. 

“Marriage,” Zayn tells him wryly, “is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

Liam almost falls off the sofa laughing, probably because he’s quite drunk so his humour barriers, which were never significantly high, have been lowered even more than usual. “You seemed to be doing all right for a while,” he points out.

He was, wasn’t he? The two of them were all right, making toast together in Zayn’s kitchen at midnight and doing two AM runs to the petrol station down the street to buy Nesquik for chocolate milk and watching eight episodes of _You’ve Been Framed_ in one afternoon. Things weren’t too shabby there. He says, “I don’t know, mate. He fucked off to America, so I obviously wasn’t great at it.”

“But he loved you,” Liam points out, which just goes to show how little he knows about the whole thing. 

Zayn goes over and firmly sits on him until he starts pretending to choke to death. “The thing is,” he says, as he flops off Liam onto the other side of the sofa, “he wanted to go. What was I going to do, tell him to stay?”

“That’s exactly what you should have done,” Liam says.

“Will you shut the fuck up, Liam?” Zayn instructs him.

Liam shrugs affably. “Just my take on it.”

“He’s probably going to end up holding hands with Daisy Lowe again,” Zayn predicts.

“Maybe,” Liam agrees. “Not really your business any more though, is it?”

Right. Zayn supposes it isn’t. He doesn’t think he likes it all that much.

*

The press starts to pick up on it three weeks later, when Harry’s still in LA and Zayn’s still shuttling himself between his house and Shahid’s studio and wishing for the merciful release of death so he doesn’t have to try to write a stupid album. The Daily Mail gets pictures of him outside Sainsbury’s and says ‘Zayn Malik Cuts A Worryingly Gaunt Figure Amid Marriage Woes’, which makes him feel shit and self-conscious and as though he should stop wearing skinny jeans. The Mirror cites a source – probably a junior showbiz reporter who’s still got some creativity lurking inside her soul – who says ‘They haven’t spoken in weeks now. Zayn’s worried that Harry’s going to get caught up in his new career in LA and neglect their marriage. He’s willing to do whatever it takes to save their relationship, but he wants Harry to come home first to show he wants to make it work’. Apparently the junior showbiz reporter can see inside his brain, which is disconcerting.

The daytimes are fine, and so are the evenings he’s in the studio, but night time can be rough. When he was with Perrie, fidelity was mostly a weird concept practised by other people, and they both turned a blind eye to whatever each other was doing, although he remembers her yelling at him a few times when he got a bit too close to the line. With Harry, he doesn’t particularly find that he wants to go out and find someone to sleep with. He doesn’t have any official security now the band’s on hiatus, and he can’t think of anyone he trusts enough to keep their mouths shut about him sleeping around when Harry isn’t there. Sex would be nice, but he’s got the memories of Harry sinking to his knees in the shower and bending himself over the sofa and pounding into Zayn from behind to keep himself content. He really doesn’t want to embarrass him by getting off with anyone else. It’s a surprisingly new concept for him. No matter what he does, he thinks he’ll still feel lonely at night.

Waliyha comes down for a week and criticises all his furniture and clothes and makes him take her to Bond Street so he can buy her multiple handbags, which is a nice diversion. The label calls him in for a meeting with Drake to see about doing some sort of collaboration, but he gets starstruck and mostly just says “Umm,” for the entire hour, so nothing really comes of it. “I’m definitely not the new Justin Timberlake,” he tells Doniya on the phone later that evening, but she just laughs at him and says “I thought you were the new Lance Bass,” which is rude.

Life is fine. He firmly believes that. 

*

Harry’s in the papers a lot, as always. He goes out with Jeff Azoff, and signs on to play a musician loosely based on Mick Jagger in a three part HBO drama for some godforsaken reason, and has sushi with James Corden. He visits a recording studio a lot and registers new songs called things like _Homesick Sunset_ and _Starboard Blues_ , and he does a lot of bikram yoga, and if Zayn asks Niall how he is, Niall just looks shifty and says “All right, I think.” He’s pictured looking bleary-eyed outside a club with Alexa Chung and goes for a hike with Taylor Swift – _Harry Styles Reconnects With Ex Amid Marriage Troubles_ , trumpets the Mail delightedly – and buys some emerald green ankle boots. He goes to a party with glitter smeared under his eyes and comes out wearing a tutu over his jeans, and buys healthy-looking concoctions that Zayn would rather die than drink from juice bars, and drives a sports car with the top down and his hair blowing tangled and messy in the wind. 

Evidently, Harry is also fine.

Zayn listens to Radio One in the morning sometimes when he’s either up way too late or he can’t sleep in properly. He likes Nick Grimshaw – he’s funny and nice and he’s always been appreciative of Zayn’s face in a non-scary way, which is something he likes in a person, and his show usually plays decent music. One day Finchy says “We’ve got a special guest on the show today, haven’t we, Nick?” and Nick says, “Do we?”, offhand like he usually is, and Finchy says, “Yes, Nick,” sounding endlessly patient, and Nick says, “Oh yeah. We’ve got Harry drunky Styles on the phone for you after eight o’clock!”

Zayn sits upright in bed.

“Drunky?” Finchy asks. “Why Drunky?”

“Because he’s in Los Angeles so it’s night time there,” Nick says. “We’ll have to speak softly to him so as not to alarm his inebriated little soul.”

Finchy laughs. Zayn thinks he might be about to stress puke all over his bedroom carpet.

“Is he still married to Zayn?” he asks. “I always thought they were really nice together.”

“Oh, they were,” Nick says carelessly, and then laughs. “Are, I mean. Are. I just meant back in the days of One Direction, they’ve been a bit busy since they made honest men of each other so I haven’t had much of a chance to observe their interactions. But they were always really lovely. Zayn’s a bit of a dark horse, isn’t he?”

“Is he?” Finchy asks. “I’m a bit disconcerted by dark horses. That’s why Niall’s my favourite.”

“That’s why Niall’s got a restraining order against you,” says Fifi, probably accurately.

Zayn listens for half an hour and wonders if he really is a dark horse. He doesn’t really talk much, he thinks; that’s probably why. It’s always strange to see how people’s perceptions of him are different from the way he looks at himself. He sits through the news twice and Clean Bandit’s new single and a caller telling them it’s raining in Fife, and then finally Nick says, “And now for the guest of honour – or so he thinks, we’re giving Pete a ring a bit later too and we all know he’s the proper star. Let’s everyone say hello to Harry Styles!”

Somewhere beyond the chorus of hellos from everyone on Nick’s team, Zayn can hear the faintly blurry far-off tone of Harry’s voice. It makes him hurt.

“So, Harry Styles,” Nick begins. “How the devil are you?”

“Not too bad, Nick Grimshaw. It’s very late here though,” Harry says.

“Are you drunk?” Finchy asks. “Or has Nick been accusing you of terrible things again?”

“Don’t tell him that!” Nick yelps, as Harry laughs and says, “No, I’m not drunk. I haven’t gone out tonight. I just wanted to say hello and brighten up your days. Also, Nick said that you were going to have Haim on and they cancelled and he needed a new guest, so here I am.”

“Have you got a new album coming out?” Nick asks.

“No.”

“Are you made up of three two sisters, each one with equally excellent hair and one with a brilliant bass face?”

“Well, I’ve got one sister and she looks grumpy quite a lot…”

“Not the same, Harry Styles. You’re a terrible replacement but you’re all we’ve got. So what would you like to tell us today?”

Harry rambles for a bit in that way that was always insanely irritating and that now, somehow, is giving Zayn odd and intense pangs of affection in his chest. He talks about how sunny it is in LA and how much fun it is doing some music out there and how of course he always talks to the other boys in the band, he was talking to Liam just this morning, and Liam is doing excellently, thank you for asking, Nick. Zayn presses his head into his pillow and wonders what it would be like if Harry was telling him this in person. Terrible, probably. Boring as fuck. He wants it back.

“Just had a text off Gemma Styles,” Nick says. “She says to stop saying she looks grumpy. Then she said something else we can’t repeat on the radio or Big Boss Ben’s going to do his own grumpy face at me. So how’s married life treating you?”

There’s a pause, although maybe that’s just because Zayn’s lost the ability to have thoughts. After a second Harry says, “It’s lovely.”

“You’ve left him in London. That’s a bit cheeky.”

Harry laughs, and Christ, he really is the perfect pop star, isn’t he? The way he manages to sound as if he’s totally okay and things are completely normal. Then again, maybe that’s how he feels. He probably doesn’t care all that much now he’s got a fantastic LA life. “He’s got his own stuff going on. We trust each other.”

“No pattering feet on the horizon, then?” Nick asks.

Another pause. Zayn thinks of what a family with Harry would be like. Awful and stressful. Brilliant, too. Harry says, slow and thoughtful, “Not just yet.”

“Good. Can’t imagine you with a baby. You’d probably leave it somewhere by mistake. Either that or dress it up in silly hats. Zayn’d have a conniption trying to stop you.”

“Heeeey,” Harry says, and Nick laughs at him. Zayn can’t stop himself from smiling, just a bit. Nick wraps up the conversation with Harry pretty quickly after that, and Zayn can’t get over how it felt like so much something and nothing at the same time. He grabs his phone and Whatsapps Harry: _Married life’s lovely ?!_ and adds a little emoji sticking its tongue out. Harry comes online, and doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then it says ‘typing’ for probably too long. Eventually he says _Tell me what I was supposed to say, Zayn_ , and Zayn doesn’t know the answer to that, so he just – he just leaves it for now. He thinks that’s safest.

*

That seems to galvanise everything else into action. Their publicists start pushing, saying they really need Zayn to okay some sort of ‘official line’, whatever that is. He tells them to say no comment, like they do with everything else, but if he’s honest he has no idea what the official line should be. _Never complain, never explain_. That’s what they said. He’s mostly forgotten what the point of this whole thing was anyway; maybe they really should have admitted it was a stupid, drunk mistake. Then maybe the other stuff wouldn’t have happened, the holding hands and kissing on stage and the deep swoops of affection in his stomach every time he saw Harry smile, and really he knows that’s what’s getting him in trouble right now. He wishes Harry wanted him back. He wishes they’d done this in the normal way. He wishes he’d chosen Harry years ago when the option was there.

But he didn’t, and here they are, in their strange separate post-band lives with their rings linking them together across oceans and continents. It all comes to a head one Tuesday, when Zayn’s supposed to be meeting Shahid in the studio to write – or, more accurately, to sit around and smoke a joint and watch Shahid work his magic on the computers, while feeling very uncreative and astonishingly incompetent. He’s in the middle of running round throwing things into his rucksack to take with him when the doorbell rings.

It’s a surprise for more than one reason. Firstly, no one ever comes to see him, because he doesn’t have many friends. He likes to tell himself that’s on purpose because he’s extremely selective, but secretly he’s not so sure. Secondly, not many people have the entrance code to his gates. So he stands still for a moment and stops searching for his sunglasses and does his best not to have a heart attack, and then he goes downstairs to answer the door.

He doesn’t know what he’s expecting, but it isn’t Harry, that’s for sure. He’s wearing his sheepskin coat and a hat and sunglasses and he’s got a battered satchel over his shoulder that probably cost him six thousand pounds. His face is the best thing that Zayn’s ever seen.

“Hi,” he says, and feels himself smile, wide and blissful. “Hey, what are you doing here?”

“We have some stuff to sort out.” Harry shifts his weight from foot to foot and looks pointedly past Zayn into his hallway, which reminds him that common practice is to allow visitors into your home. So they go inside and Harry toes off his boots and almost falls over – Zayn can’t help but smile, fondly – and Zayn makes him a cup of tea and texts Shahid to know he won’t be coming in today because he’s got better things to do. Shahid texts back, _There’s nothing better than creating art._ Zayn can’t quite tell if he’s serious or not. Probably. Sometimes he thinks he needs to seriously re-evaluate his taste in people.

“So,” Zayn says, when they’re situated at his kitchen table with mugs of tea and a tube of Pringles. “It’s good to see you.”

Harry smiles vaguely. “Yeah? Yeah. You too. I just sort of thought… yeah. I thought I should see you.” He ducks down and opens his satchel, bringing out a sheaf of papers. “I was going to post these to you, but I wanted to talk about them first.”

“Right.” There’s an odd, despairing feeling that Zayn can’t shake as he takes the papers out of Harry’s hands. He scans them quickly, flips through the pages. Divorce papers. So. This is it.

“The thing is,” Harry says, not quite making eye contact with him, “being married to you is making me very sad. And my therapist—”

“You’ve got a fucking therapist?” Zayn bursts out, annoyance rolling in his chest. “Jesus Christ, Harry. You’re so fucking LA.”

“What’s wrong with having a therapist?” Harry says, sounding more tightly wound than Zayn remembers hearing from him in a long time. “It’s good for you. It wouldn’t hurt you, actually. I just…” He sighs, and finally looks Zayn in the eye. “I need to be done with this. So I’m hoping that we can work it out ourselves.”

“Yeah.” Zayn tries desperately to get his head under control. “Yeah, we can…” He swallows. “Right. If you need it to be over, it can be over.”

“Good. So…” Harry sighs and tucks his hair behind his ear before getting a biro out of his bag. Christ, he really did come prepared. “There are three ways you can get a divorce – desertion…”

“Well, you did fuck off to America for quite a long time,” Zayn mutters.

Harry levels a long gaze at him. “You didn’t want to come with me,” he says. “You never want to come with me.” He moves on before Zayn can interrupt him again. “Adultery, which is – I guess that’s – have you?”

Zayn shakes his head, and Harry frowns a little before looking back at the papers. “Me neither. So, unreasonable behaviour. We need five counts of it.”

“Like what sort of thing?” The idea of thinking of five unreasonable things that Harry’s done seems impossible. “We think of them for each other?”

“No. One of us files the papers citing the other one’s unreasonable behaviour.”

Zayn sets his jaw. “Well, you went to LA,” he says.

“You stayed here,” Harry counters.

“You held hands with Daisy Lowe.”

“She’s my _friend_! You never talk to me, not ever, Zayn. You fucked around with me when I was eighteen and then you got engaged and forgot about me and since then you haven’t said a single real word to me,” Harry says, all in a rush, and – that actually sounds valid. All of it does.

Zayn stares at him. He really wants a cigarette but he also doesn’t want to give Harry an asthma attack. “Fine then,” he snaps. “I’ll be the unreasonable one.” He doubts that Harry perfect Styles could be unreasonable for a second if he tried. “What are you going to put down for me?”

“I – I don’t know.” Harry looks troubled. “What do you think?”

Being asked to list his own faults is not Zayn’s idea of a fun way to spend a Tuesday afternoon. “I didn’t come to LA with you,” he says. “I won’t give up smoking for you. I – I haven’t got an income anymore.”

“Haven’t you?” Harry asks, looking up at him with a slight frown.

“I don’t know.” Zayn hunches over, feeling uncomfortable, curling a hand around the warm tea mug in front of him. “I keep – I keep trying to write stuff but nothing’s coming out.”

“Oh.” Harry considers that for a moment. “Shame. What other unreasonable things have you done?”

“Why do I have to be the one to think about this shit? Fucking psychoanalysing myself, what the fuck, this is full of crap,” Zayn says, feeling abruptly done with it all. The first time he’s seen Harry in forever and it’s because Harry wants to get a divorce. The last time he’s probably going to see him in a while too. That’s sad. This is shit. He wants to throw Harry out on his arse and then lie in bed for four days straight. “There must be things you can think of that you hate about me.”

“You think everything I like is stupid,” Harry says. “You make fun of me all the time. You think I’m thick.”

“I don’t think you’re thick,” Zayn says. He hates that Harry thinks that. He feels like the bottom of his stomach’s just dropped out.

Harry shrugs. “You act like it. You never commit to anything. You never talk to me properly.”

Zayn blinks at him. “So what you’re saying is – we don’t have any interests in common, and I have communication problems? You could put those down as the fourth and fifth things.” His hands are shaking.

“Yeah.” Harry sucks the end of his pen for a second, frowning at the forms. “I could.”

“Well then.” Zayn stares accusingly at him until he starts writing things down. They battle through a few more pages, but in the end it seems like it’s a lot easier to leave it all to the lawyers. It’s depressing and it’s hard to focus, and outside it’s starting to rain, that mid-November malaise that they usually missed because they were out of the country promoting albums and going on chat shows and taking four Imodium pills so they didn’t shit themselves during their album launch onstage in Orlando. Admittedly, that last one was just Zayn.

They slump in his living room and watch TV. Harry presses his socked feet under Zayn’s thigh, keeping his toes warm, and Zayn slings an arm around his bony knees. He still doesn’t know how Harry can be this comfortable in skinny jeans all day every day. They watch Antiques Roadshow repeats, which Harry gets really into because apparently he really loves vases, and then Countdown, which Zayn is a secret huge fan of because he’s actually quite good at it. “I always forget you’re really clever,” Harry says at the end. Zayn isn’t sure whether he should take that as an insult or not. Harry wriggles his toes underneath Zayn’s leg to make Zayn look at him and then he says, “You could go back to uni.”

“I could,” Zayn agrees. “But being surrounded by eighteen year olds might be a bit miserable even if none of them knew who I was.”

“A lot of them probably had our posters on their walls,” Harry agrees thoughtfully.

“I like the idea of being able to blend in,” Zayn says. “At a lecture, you know? Coming in late and sitting on the end of the back row and people looking at you because you’re shit and late and not because you’re in a pop band.”

“I can’t believe your fantasies involve going to lectures,” Harry says, but he’s smiling.

“I’ve got a lot more fantasies than that,” Zayn says.

“What like?” Harry’s smile turns wolflike.

Zayn feels vulnerable, he thinks, but it’s in a good way. “Normal ones. Tying people up. Bit of cheeky candlewax every now and then. Nipple clamps.”

Harry stares at him. “Go on.”

Zayn laughs and curls a hand around Harry’s ankle. “No. I wasn’t talking about those fantasies. I like the idea of being a teacher, like I was going to. Changing lives in a more hands-on way. I know that we’ve helped people and done charity stuff but you don’t really feel it in your heart. I want to know what it’d be like to live in a student house.”

“Dirty, probably,” Harry says. “Cold. No space for your milk in the fridge. That’s what Gem said. Very specific on the milk thing.”

“It’s like we opened all these doors for ourselves when we got famous, right?” Zayn squirms round so he can face Harry properly. “But at the time we didn’t realise about all the stuff we were shutting down. Any chance to have normal lives and be normal people. You’re always going to be the curly haired one from One Direction. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just…”

“When you meet people normally, you don’t have a pre-conceived idea of what they’ll be like. And people will always have that for us.” Harry shrugs. “We’ll always be the ones from One Direction who got married. Can’t change that no matter how divorced we get.”

Zayn nods, that familiar sadness drifting over him again. “I think sometimes I’m going to miss you,” he admits.

“Well. That’s understandable. I’m amazing.” Harry looks down for a moment, and then he reaches out to take Zayn’s hands, running his thumb tenderly over his knuckles. “What do you want to do today?”

Zayn looks into his eyes, and thinks _This is my last day of having this. This is my last day of having you_. Aloud, he says, “Let’s enjoy it.”

*

In the end they do. Harry offers to make spag bol for dinner like he did in Ibiza but Zayn decides to make chicken curry instead, and then they watch hours of The Simpsons, and Harry proves that there are somehow things that Zayn hasn’t learned about him yet by doing an absolutely dead-on Krusty the Clown impersonation. They go up to bed early, because of course they do. Sex is what they do. Sex is what they’ve got together, what they’ve always had. It’s a shame that as it turns out, it’s not the best foundation for an accidental marriage to be based on.

They get ready for bed as though they’ve been married for twenty years instead of a couple of months, as though they’re a real couple that’s had enough time together to get boring. Harry brushes his teeth first and Zayn goes in halfway through and muscles him out of the way. Harry smiles widely, toothpaste froth dribbling down his chin. “Get out of here,” Zayn says around his toothbrush. “You’re a disgrace.”

Harry laughs and then almost chokes and has to spit his toothpaste into the sink. “See?” Zayn says, holding back a smile. “Look at you, you’re a state.” 

Harry doesn’t say anything, but he does lean in to tenderly wipe a smear of toothpaste from his chin across Zayn’s cheek as he leaves the room. Zayn supposes he probably deserves that.

In the bedroom Harry strips slowly, as though they’ve got all the time in the world. T-shirt first, the firm muscles of his back flexing, turning round like he wants to show Zayn his body, his flat stomach and his lightly defined muscles and his tattoos that look almost randomly assigned to different parts of his skin. Harry’s smile says, _join me_ , and for once he isn’t off balance as he takes off his jeans. Zayn does join him. He joins him so that Harry can stroke his sides and kiss his neck and unbutton his shirt inch by painful inch, so he can drop to his knees and mouth at Zayn’s stomach and undo his belt and unzip his jeans, pulling them down to his knees. He steps out of his jeans and underwear and God, he thinks, God, he loves being naked with Harry. He always has. It’s the only way to be. 

Harry sucks his dick long and slow, as though it’s the only thing in the world that he loves. Zayn pushes Harry’s hair off his forehead and lets shaking fingers dance across his brow before they tangle in his hair properly, holding him there, Harry letting out a low approving noise that vibrates through Zayn’s cock. He pulls off when Zayn’s halfway there, hips aching with the effort of not moving, and says “I don’t want you to come before you’ve fucked me,” with lips that are bruised red and spit-shiny.

They do it with Harry on his back and Zayn between his legs, fingering him and feeling Harry tense and shift, watching his toes curl as he finds his prostate. When he finally sinks into him their foreheads are pressed together and Zayn pauses, finds Harry’s mouth and kisses him, messy and eager. Harry feels so hot and so tight, coiled muscles and soft mouth and his fingernails digging into Zayn’s back as he holds onto him like Zayn’s saving him. Zayn wishes he could have saved him. He wishes they could have saved each other, but if tonight’s all they’ve got, he’s going to make the most of it.

He fucks him deeply to start with, long thrusts that make Harry cry out and move with him, the bed creaking beneath them as though its bones are aching. Harry grabs for him and pulls his face down, breath hot on Zayn’s face, heels digging hard into his back, needy and demanding as he bites Zayn’s bottom lip a little too hard. Zayn fucks him harder and faster then and Harry’s head falls backwards so Zayn can kiss his throat, the warm pale skin that hasn’t seen the sun as much, the stubbled underside of his jaw, fucking into him hard and deep. Harry comes first, hot and hard between them, hand tightening on the back of Zayn’s neck, breath coming in shaking gasps afterwards. Zayn isn’t far afterwards, feeling that familiar tightening, and although he’s in the habit of turning his face away when he comes Harry holds onto his hair so he can drag him down and press kisses onto his forehead right afterwards.

When he pulls out Zayn’s almost lightheaded, rolling sideways and using Harry’s shoulder as a temporary pillow. “I love doing that,” he says, fumbling until he’s holding onto Harry’s hand.

“Me too.” Harry sounds subdued and then he rolls over so he can curl himself up with Zayn. “You know what? I don’t regret it.”

“Tonight?” Zayn asks, heart beating a little faster.

“Any of it,” Harry tells him, because he’s a ridiculous, wonderful, romantic idiot. 

Zayn kisses Harry’s cheek, and then his jawline, and then the corner of his mouth, and surprises himself by saying, and meaning, “Me neither.”

*

The next morning Zayn wakes up first, somehow. He crawls out of bed to take a shower, and when Harry comes downstairs, crumple-faced and tousle-haired, Zayn’s eating some Coco Pops in the kitchen. “Afternoon, sleepy,” he says.

“LA time,” Harry says, by way of explanation, his voice croaky and fucked. “You got up before me.”

“Well observed,” Zayn says, unable to keep a sharp edge out of his voice. He’s always found it harder to be soft and kind in the sunlight. He is one acquainted with the night, etc. Robert Frost. He definitely should have done an English degree.

“Hmm.” The corner of Harry’s mouth lifts mirthlessly as he opens the fridge and starts foraging in it. Zayn isn’t sure if he’ll find much besides ketchup and beer and the curry leftovers from last night, but he’s willing to let him have a go. 

“How can you only have one type of cheese?” Harry says, taking his head out of the fridge with an aghast expression. “There’s just mild cheddar.”

“I think there might be Babybels in there too,” Zayn points out helpfully. Harry looks at him as if the words aren’t computing. “And cheese strings?” Zayn tries hopefully. 

Harry blinks at him and says very slowly, “Zayn, do you know that you’re a millionaire pop star?”

Zayn frequently tries to forget that fact. “Umm,” he mumbles, lifting his shoulder in an approximation of a nod before turning away.

“Fucking hell,” Harry says, and manages to find a yoghurt. “This was what I was talking about. The lack of communication.”

Zayn throws him a look that feels more withering than he intended it to be. “Harry, don’t get all fucking serious about cheese, of all things.”

They’re off balance from then on. Zayn asks Harry where he’s going, and Harry says, tersely, “Home,” and doesn’t elaborate, and Zayn accidentally snaps, “Now who’s shit at communicating?” and Harry rolls his eyes in a passive aggressive way that makes Zayn want to push him down a lift shaft. Instead he just makes Harry a cup of tea and puts too much milk in it. That’ll show him.

After a while Harry wanders back upstairs to shower and pack and probably to mope. That’s what Zayn intends to do on the sofa as he flicks from channel to channel. Shahid’s texted him: _Coming in today, bro?_ and Zayn texts back, sick and sad that life’s going back to normal, _Yeah bro. See you later_. The divorce papers are sitting on the table staring at him, and when Harry comes back in he frowns at them and then shuffles them into his satchel. 

“I’ve called a cab,” he tells Zayn.

“Right. Yeah.” Zayn feels like he should move off the sofa but for some reason all he can do is sit and stare awkwardly at Harry. “How did you even get here yesterday?”

Harry shrugs. “Got the tube. Walked from the station.”

“You got the…” The idea of getting the tube, with all those people crammed in one space, who could potentially recognise him, is Zayn’s idea of a nightmare. “Jesus.”

“It was fine,” Harry says. “Just got on a southbound train at Hampstead, changed at Camden Town, then got back on the High Barnet branch and—”

“Shut up, Harry,” Zayn says, mostly out of habit. “Nice story, though.”

“That’s another thing to add to the unreasonable behaviour list,” Harry says, clearly trying desperately to keep his voice light. “Never listening to my stories.”

“No one listens to your stories,” Zayn says.

Harry tries to smile, and fails. “True.”

Zayn is sad, he realises suddenly. Deeply and horribly so, in a way he doesn’t remember feeling before. “Are you going to come over again some time?” he asks.

Harry wrinkles his nose. “Nah. Don’t think so. Do you?”

“No,” Zayn has to admit. “Next time the five of us are all around, then…”

“Yeah,” Harry agrees. Silently, Zayn wonders when the fuck that’s going to be. Possibly never, judging by the radio silence in their joint Whatsapp group since they announced the hiatus. He’s talked to them all individually, sure, but he’s willing to bet they feel the same reticence as him as being classed as One Direction again so soon.

After a moment Harry’s phone rings, and he goes over to the buzzer on the wall to let his taxi through Zayn’s gates. “Right then,” he says, and hovers awkwardly. “We’ll probably – we don’t need to release a statement about the divorce, right?”

“Never complain,” Zayn says, the words catching in his throat. The top of his nose is starting to hurt and he’s getting terrified he might be about to cry. “Never explain.”

“Fucking Kate Moss,” Harry says, with feeling. He shoulders his bag and Zayn gets to his feet finally. He walks Harry down his hallway and to the front door, and then Harry turns to him and gives him a shadow of a smile. “So.”

“So,” Zayn agrees. He wants to reach out and touch him, but he feels as though there’s some sort of invisible wall growing between the two of them.

“Thanks,” Harry says simply, and starts to unlock the front door. He stills for a moment, and then, suddenly, he turns back to Zayn. “Why did you end it?” he asks, “you know, when we were younger. I know Perrie was there, but why did you end it with _me_?” There are tears in his eyes suddenly, which is the most horrific thing that Zayn’s ever seen.

“Because I had to make a decision,” he spits out, each word hurting and tearing a new wound that will become a scar. He remembers those difficult days years ago with Perrie on the phone and Harry all hooded eyes and slow smiles down the corridor, when Zayn hadn’t felt good enough for either of them but had wanted to do what was right, for once in his life. “I couldn’t just go on with both of you like that. And it wasn’t fair on her. She loved me, and you and me were just…”

“I loved you,” Harry says, as though Zayn’s extremely stupid, and then he makes a noise that’s half-laugh and half-sob, dragging the heels of his hands across his eyes. “Of course I loved you. Why the fuck else would I marry you?” He shakes his head a bit, and looks at Zayn as though he’s asking him if there’s anything else he’s got to say, but there isn’t, he’s spiralling, he’s gone, he’s lost. Then it’s as though the air goes out of Harry finally, as though now they’re really over. “Bye, Zayn,” he says simply, and then he’s gone.

*

A month later, the divorce is final. The newspapers go crazy. _1D Heartthrobs End Short Marriage_ , one of them says. The Mail talks a lot about how much gay marriage is ruining the country, and Sir Elton John gets cross with them, which is mildly entertaining. The Sun just goes for _Harry Styles Back On The Market,_ which is hurtful, but then again Zayn isn’t sure he wants his back-on-the-market status to be advertised too much. He still feels raw. 

Harry goes home, and then he goes to America after that. New York and LA, and Zayn sees some pictures of him in San Francisco too, smiling exhaustedly with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. Zayn does his own thing. He signs a deal with Columbia and gets to work with Shahid some more. For a while, Zayn thought of himself as a pretty horrible songwriter, especially those days recently when he couldn’t get a word out, couldn’t sing a riff that sounded original. It’s never come to him as easily as it did to Liam and Louis, who managed to get out track after track of catchy pop songs at a slightly alarming rate, pinging emails across to Zayn to ask what he thought three times a night as he puzzled over one bassline for two weeks. Somehow this album is easier. He writes ten songs one after the other, lyrics that you’d have to be mad not to understand. _Days we spent together. Days I’ll keep forever. Days I spent with you._ Shahid rolls out beats underneath his voice and turns the words from something so sentimental it makes Zayn cringe with embarrassment into something slicker and sharper. It sounds good. He’s starting to feel proud of himself.

When the ten demos are down, he finally goes home to Bradford. It feels good, as though he’s breaking down some kind of barrier inside himself. His mum looks at him sympathetically and makes him four meals a day, and his dad makes him come to his circuit training classes at the gym and kindly doesn’t laugh at him when Zayn has to go out to be sick from exertion halfway through. Doniya puts makeup on him to test out looks for her blog, and Waliyha steals his Netflix password so he ends up with _She’s The Man_ and _One Tree Hill_ in his recommendations, and then she makes him watch them with her. Safa’a develops a knack of coming into his room when he needs company most, and sitting on the end of his bed and telling him about her day, about her life, about all the normal things that he’s been missing out on for years. He applies for an English module at the Open University, and starts taking driving lessons, and pays for his mum to get a conservatory on the back of the house. Practical steps. Moving on with his life. Finding a life, really.

He spends a month there before he decides to go back to London. He’s got friends there, he realises that now. A life. He’s got Louis down the road and Liam and Niall are just phonecalls and car journeys away, and then there’s Shahid in the studio, listening carefully to his voice and valuing his thoughts and input. He finds people to talk to about setting up his own charity, because he’s been thinking about that a lot, and he wants to figure out a way to combine his interests – art, religion, music, and to do some good with it somehow. Maybe he’s never going to be an English teacher and help people on the front line, but there are still ways for him to do something lasting and good.

He goes into the studio again and they lay down the tracks for real. He does take after take after take and pushes his voice, hits the high notes, lets himself curl around the lower notes, coaxed out of him like magic. He sings lines like _I was afraid to love you and now I know what I lost,_ and _With me or her, I don’t care, boy, I want to know you’re happy now._ Billboard previews the album when it’s still unfinished and rough around the edges, and calls him the next Frank Ocean. It’s nice, but Zayn thinks it’s probably just because they’re both boys singing love songs for other boys. It’s fine, though. He’ll take that.

He sets up his charity, an organisation providing funds and support for young Islamic people who want to go into artistic industries, and sinks three million into it to get it off the ground. He gets cheques from the boys too, even from Harry along with a note saying _With love – H. xx_ , plus five hundred thousand from Shahid and another huge cheque from Amir Khan, which knocks him back a bit and makes him decide to add a sporting division to the trust. Amir asks if he can be patron of it, which is a lot more than Zayn could even have hoped for. They do a launch, and a lot of people show up – Jemima Khan and Mo Farah and Adil Ray, along with the boys, of course – minus Harry, who’s currently wowing people by showing up at small clubs in LA to play short acoustic sets of his new material. Simon Cowell appears halfway through the evening with a big cheque in his pocket, and says a few very nice things about Zayn that make him feel awkward and sweaty and furiously pleased.

His family comes too. He sends a couple of cars for them, a fancy limo for his sisters and a sleek Bentley for his mum and dad. His dad’s hardly been to anything he’s done. He was there all the time at school, when Zayn was in Bugsy Malone and Grease and Oliver!, and then through the X Factor, but Zayn only remembers him coming to about three 1D gigs because he hated the noise and the screaming, because he didn’t understand the lifestyle. But he shows up alongside Zayn’s mum, who’s glittering in a dark green dress and holding his hand nervously. His sisters bounce inside giggling – Zayn suspects that maybe the limo provided them with champagne – and his dad stops for a moment, holds onto Zayn’s arm and says, “This is really something great you’ve done here.”

“Yeah?” Zayn says. His throat’s closing up a bit.

“You should be very proud of yourself,” his dad says, and kisses Zayn’s cheek before heading inside. That’s a bit of a highlight.

The launch goes well, obviously. He hires good people to run the trust for him and does interviews with the Guardian and the Sunday Times and makes a few school appearances across the country, Tower Hamlets and Bradford and Leicester and Blackburn. He gets slated by some people, but he thinks he’s finally reached the point where he doesn’t give a fuck. According to a lot of people – mostly non-Muslims, he’s truly unsurprised to note – he’s a hypocrite for being part of the Islamic faith while being openly non-heterosexual. “It’s all about being true to yourself,” he tells the Guardian. “Faith and prayer and doing your best to spread good. I’ll be honest, I haven’t always been the best at that. I really want to do better. I’m trying my hardest.”

And so he does. He makes music he loves, and he goes out into the world as often as he can, and he spends his money in a good and productive way. Sleeping at night gets easier. He feels less lonely. But there are times when he wakes up at four and reaches out to the empty space beside him, and all he can think about is Harry.

*

Somehow time passes when Zayn’s too busy to notice it, and then his phone buzzes and it’s Niall in their five-way Whatsapp group. He says _FEllasssss guess what !!!_ and then Liam says _Its a year isnt it_ and Louis says _FUCKIN ELLLL LADS!_ Zayn looks at the flashing screen for a moment and feels as though he’s been wrapped up in warm arms.

They decide to meet up, the four of them. Harry stays quiet in their chat, although all the arrangements are there for him to see. Zayn wishes he’d just say something – a confirmation, a ‘Maybe another time’, a ‘Fuck you all, I’ve moved on’. He’s still got Harry’s ring on his finger, which is something that the tabloids haven’t hesitated to notice. Maybe Harry’s moved on better than he has, but Zayn won’t beat himself up about it – he’s done the best he could.

They all congregate at Louis’s house. Zayn is last to arrive even though he lives seven minutes away – “Late as usual, Malik!” Louis booms as he opens the door, and Zayn rolls his eyes, fighting back a smile.

The four of them sit around Louis’s kitchen table and open some beers. Niall tells them all about the writing he’s doing with Tom Fletcher and Louis talks about how his management company’s going – brilliantly, apparently – and Zayn explains everything about his album and his charity and then Liam says bashfully, his eyes crinkled at the corners, “Me and Soph are having a baby.”

Everyone goes mental. He gets enveloped in three sets of arms and by the time they let him resurface his eyes are suspiciously damp-looking as he explains, still smiling helplessly as though nothing could ever stop him, “It was a surprise. I mean, we wanted to get married first, but this is just – it’s just brilliant.”

Niall demands to be godfather and Louis gives him some practical baby advice – “Always assume there’s something coming out of one of the ends” – and Zayn leans over so he can look at the scan pictures on Liam’s phone. Once they’re all seated again, Niall says, “Lucky Harry isn’t here. He’d be in floods of tears.”

“Where is Harry these days?” Liam asks.

“Fuck knows,” Louis says. “I’m sure he’s having a grand old time.”

Liam looks at Zayn questioningly, and Zayn raises a shoulder in a half-shrug. “Dunno, mate.” It hurts to admit that. “We haven’t spoken in a while.”

“Well,” Niall says practically, “you can’t blame him. He couldn’t have waited round for you forever.”

“He was never waiting for me,” Zayn points out.

Niall makes a sceptical scoffing noise.

“He _wasn’t_ ,” Zayn insists.

“Except that he was,” Louis says, matter of fact. “Liam, can we look at the pictures again to see if it’s got a willy or not? I want to know if it’s a Louis or a Louise.”

“It’s too early to tell,” Liam says, trying to keep his phone out of Louis’s hands before sighing and surrendering it to him. “Fine, God, fine, stop – Louis, stop scrolling through my – Louis, you weren’t supposed to see that!”

Louis cackles wildly as Zayn discovers it’s still fairly easy to fall back into his own mind and pleasantly drift off even when he’s surrounded by his boys and the noise they inevitably create together. He knows them so well that it’s like being alone when it’s just them. Harry waiting for him? The idea of it is ridiculous. All those years with Perrie when he and Harry could have been – Jesus. The fact that they were married. He wonders now if he could have held onto it, if he’d really tried.

“Do you think Harry really loved me?” he asks suddenly.

Liam stops wrestling Louis and looks at Zayn with something resembling pity. “Zayn, you twat. You already know the answer to that.”

Zayn’s starting to think that he does. “I wrote my album about him,” he admits. “Every song. They’re all about him.”

“That won’t be awkward at all,” Louis says.

“I think it’s nice,” Niall says staunchly.

Zayn just shrugs. Being awkward and nice with his album doesn’t sound so bad. It sounds better than things he’s been in the past, which include ‘uncommunicative’ and ‘slightly unpleasant’. And anyway, he reminds himself, Harry likes it when he’s nice.

*

Harry turns up the next morning, of course, looking sheepish and rakishly handsome in an implausibly tilted hat and a jacket that’s an insane combination of sequins and leather. “Room for one more?” he says, pigeon-toed in three thousand pound boots, and shuffles his way into Louis’s kitchen to make himself a cup of tea.

“Don’t freak out, Zayn,” Louis says in a loud whisper, and then he says “Ouch!” after Zayn kicks him in the shin.

“You deserved that,” says Niall, bringer of justice and harmony, and Liam nods in agreement.

The only available space in the living room is the other end of the sofa that Zayn’s on, so Harry curls himself into it with a peaceful look on his face. “Hey, ex-husband,” he says.

“Hey, former lover,” Zayn replies, trying to keep himself on an even keel, and Harry’s face relaxes into a more genuine smile.

“Liam, tell him your news,” Louis demands, and so Liam does, as halting and happy as the first time he told the rest of them.

As predicted, Harry’s eyes fill up with tears. “Oh my God, Liam, I’m so happy for you,” he says, and gives Liam a hug that goes on for probably too long. “Can I be godfather?”

“It’s Andy,” Liam says, not for the first time.

“But—” Louis begins.

“Andy,” Liam says sternly.

“I would be the best godfather,” Louis tells them all. “I would be Fun Uncle Louis. I’d take them to the fairground and to museums and I would oversee their moral education—”

“Ha,” says Niall, with feeling.

“Rude,” Louis shouts, and Liam almost falls over laughing.

Zayn meets Harry’s eyes, just like he always did, so they can exchange a look of fondness for the others. The look lingers for a moment too long, and Zayn feels himself flush as he looks down. Harry’s still wearing his ring, he notes, his heart doing something strange and ecstatic, and he feels his smile broaden.

*

They drink and eat and play FIFA and drink some more and then Louis loses FIFA and pitches a fit so they all have to pacify him by ordering extra pizza. By midnight they’re all quite drunk and Liam admits, finally, “Lads, we can’t end this hiatus just yet, can we?”

Niall shakes his head firmly on the other side of the room. “I love you all, but no. One day, but not yet.”

“When we’ve all run out of money,” Harry suggests.

“Which will be sooner rather than later if we all keep setting up extremely successful charities, _Zayn_ ,” Louis says, and Zayn has to laugh.

“I want to do stuff with you all again,” he says. “But maybe not for a while. And maybe not even new material.”

“Just a tour,” Harry agrees. “Maybe just of the UK.”

“The rest of the world might be a bit cross,” Liam points out.

Harry shrugs a shoulder. “We owe Britain. Yeah, Niall, Ireland too. They were the first to give us everything,” he says.

“The first ones who loved us,” Zayn agrees. There’s something special about the first fans. The first ones to bare their souls to the band. The first ones to give them their hearts, for safe keeping. He hopes they did a good job. 

“Maybe this time next year,” Liam says. “The baby’ll be six months by then…”

“You could bring it,” Niall suggests. “We could be your babysitters.”

Liam looks alarmed.

“Lou probably won’t be able to come,” Harry says, with a note of sadness in his voice. “Lux’ll have school.”

“We could do it during the holidays,” Zayn suggests, and Harry raises an eyebrow. “It’s our decision. It’s time to make our own rules,” Zayn tells him, and Harry’s lips part a little as he frowns.

*

They all sleep in the living room again. Zayn wonders if maybe that’s going to become a yearly thing, turning back into those teenagers at Harry’s stepdad’s bungalow. He takes one of the big sofas and a blanket that smells like Louis’s dog, and wakes up before the others, because the curtains are open slightly and there’s a shaft of light falling directly on his face. “For fuck’s sake,” he mutters to himself, and tiptoes outside for a cigarette. He wishes he could go back to being eighteen and falling asleep at the drop of a hat and staying that way for sixteen hours. He wishes he could go back to a lot of things about being eighteen.

The ground outside is cool and a little slick under his bare feet, leaves crunching and sticking to his toes. Possibly no shoes was a bad idea, but fuck it, he’s done it now. He thinks of the boys’ sleeping faces inside and feels a pang of sharp affection for them. Brothers forever, the lot of them. Harry’s the weird stepbrother he has inappropriate feelings for. That still works.

He’s smiling to himself about that as he hears footsteps padding outside and towards him, and turns to see Harry there, looking rumpled and freshly woken, stretching out his shoulders in his thin t-shirt. “Morning,” he rasps, and comes up to stand right next to Zayn, despite the cigarette. He bumps his hip against Zayn’s, and holds it there. “Sleep all right?”

“Fine until the fucking sun woke me up,” Zayn says, and Harry hmms out a laugh. Zayn thinks of saying goodbye to Harry at his front door. The way that Harry had said he’d loved him. He wonders how long that was for. He wonders if he made him unhappy. Probably. “I’m sorry about years ago,” he says abruptly. “I should have thought about your feelings more.”

“Oh.” Harry draws back, eyes wide with surprise. “Don’t worry about it.”

“But I am worried about it,” Zayn explains, and this feels good, this letting go, finally. “I never realised how you felt. I didn’t think enough about it. I acted like I didn’t care about you and I’m sorry for that.”

“But you did care about me?” Harry asks, and waits for an answer, chewing his bottom lip.

“Yeah. I cared about you the whole time,” Zayn admits, feeling like he’s opening his chest up, heart out there on display. 

Harry surveys him for a moment and then he smiles, dimples pressing into his cheeks. “Good. Me too,” he says. “Come on.” He gestures at Zayn’s cigarette. “Put that out. Let’s wake them up.”

Zayn has far off memories of being woken up by the others years ago, Niall jumping on the bed and Liam singing loudly and Louis shouting something very close to his head. He smiles at Harry, slow and wicked. “Let’s do it.”

*

Liam is the first to leave, drifting back to Sophia and to his real life, and then Niall goes, and then, finally, Harry leaves. Zayn stands at the doorway and watches him go to the cab at the kerb, his funny tapping walk in his silly boots, the sparkles on his jacket glittering in the autumn sunlight. He turns just as he’s about to get into the car, flicks his hair off his face and gives Zayn the most genuine smile he thinks he’s seen from Harry in a long while. He smiles back, he can’t help it, he just does; he feels whole for the first time in months.

“Shit, you are a state, aren’t you?” Louis says from behind him, and loops his arm around Zayn’s waist to pull him back into the house. “Did you tell him you wrote an album about him?”

“No,” Zayn says. “What’s the point, really?”

“You are such a dick,” Louis says fondly, and strokes Zayn’s hair.

Zayn shrugs at him, but the happiness at seeing Harry and things being almost okay is starting to dissipate. He feels cold and sad all over again, because Harry’s gone. Louis seems to see something in his face, and sighs. “Come on,” he says, and starts shepherding Zayn towards the living room. “Let’s watch some nice football.”

“I really don’t want to,” Zayn protests, but Louis makes him do it anyway, and it’s fine, really. Hypnotic in a way, even though he doesn’t really care what happens on screen. He likes Louis’s soft little cheers and the players zipping around and the authoritative tones of the commentators, and then he likes watching half an Agatha Christie film afterwards, and then he likes Midsomer Murders after that. He likes sitting across from Louis in his familiar living room, their friendship a comfortable bond that he hopes will never be tested. Halfway through Midsomer Murders Zayn looks over at him sharply and says, “Hey, Tommo? Thanks,” and even though Louis says “Zayn, as per usual I have no idea what on earth you’re on about,” he looks pleased anyway.

*

Zayn finishes his album, and the label likes it, which is kind of an enormous relief. Shahid thinks they’ve got some guaranteed hits on it, and although Zayn doesn’t really like to count his chickens like that, he’s proud of what they’ve produced together in a way he could never bring himself to feel about One Direction’s stuff. The things he thinks he’ll take from that band are friendship, hard work, how to cope with pressure, how it feels to succeed, how it feels to fail. And love, maybe. He’s still working on that one.

He titles the album _All The Days Of My Life_ , after the marriage vows they made and ended up breaking. He thinks of the songs as ten love letters, even though they’re hardly Adele style ballads about broken hearts. There are a few songs about aching and yearning and lost love. There are a few songs about falling in love for the first time. There are a couple of songs about really, really great sex. There’s one song in which he tries to say sorry. He thinks that sums it up pretty well.

*

There are reports about Harry in LA, and Sydney, and then LA again, and then New York, but Zayn’s too busy thinking about his album to worry about it too much. Harry will be home some time. He always is. Zayn should have figured that one out earlier. There are a lot of things he should have figured out earlier. He thinks of the way Harry used to look at him, and the way it made him feel, and thinks _That’s it. That’s what I want._ He liked the feeling of being loved by Harry Styles, and he wants it back again.

Harry lands in LA at the beginning of spring, when Zayn’s album has been out for three weeks. It was number one for all of those weeks, which is something he isn’t sure he’ll ever stop feeling disconcerted by. People liked it. Critics liked it. Fans liked it too, and most importantly, so did the other boys. He’s trying not to read headlines, but a few of them have caught his eye, mostly the ones that linked the lyrics back to Harry. Of course they were; he’s glad they picked up on that, he wants to make these memories public, he wants to openly admit that there was love there. He wants to scream it to the world and make sure that everyone knows he was in love. Taylor Swift tweets ‘He really does never go out of style’, which makes Zayn laugh a bit. He favourites the tweet, and gets a million messages asking him about it. It’s almost like the old days. He almost likes it.

He waits some more for Harry to come back to London, but he gets tired of that pretty quickly. Waiting around for someone is boring. He thinks that probably being Harry and being the one who makes all the moves all the time gets boring too. He should probably make the effort this time. So he gets on a flight to LA, and arrives in dazzling, disconcerting sunshine that’s utterly at odds from London’s springtime clouds. He feels happy as he finds a cab, as though a weight has been lifted off him. As it turns out, making decisions is good for you. He doesn’t know why he didn’t work that out before. The drive to Harry’s house doesn’t take too long. Honestly, he thinks it’s a miracle that he remembered the address. Maybe it’s destiny, somehow. He’ll let himself believe that fate exists, just for today. 

Harry’s house is beautiful from the outside, all dark wood and shining glass and gorgeously manicured gardens. He remembers Harry’s view from the back: the valley, the lights, the rippling pool, and he thinks of the peace he felt here, the way it melted through him the morning after he spent the night. He rings the bell, and thinks _Here goes_. This might be one of those moments. Turning from one part of his life into the next, like when he and Perrie broke up, or when the band went on hiatus, except this is a beginning and not an end. This is a lifetime, he hopes.

Typically, Harry doesn’t answer the door, but Zayn remembers something that he said ages ago, something about a spare key under the – a fake brick or something. He taps around underneath the windowsill and comes up with a hollow one that swings open to reveal a set of keys. Harry, it would appear, is not amazing at security measures. He manages to let himself in and is hit by stillness and cool air. He drops his bag and jacket and takes off his shoes and walks through Harry’s house, past the big kitchen and through the pale-carpeted living room with its big soft red sofa that they once fucked on, and then somehow he sees Harry. He’s standing by the pool, tall and lean and alone as he looks out over the valley, his arms papered with familiar ink and his face set in a sweet, familiar way that makes Zayn’s heart swell with a mixture of affection and want.

“Harry,” Zayn says, stepping out onto the grass, spiky under his socked feet. “Hey.”

Harry turns quickly, his face changing from alarm to surprise to joy in a second. “Oh my God,” he says. “How did you...”

“Spare key,” Zayn explains. “I rang the bell first, I – sorry…”

“Don’t say sorry,” Harry says. He comes over to Zayn and looks down into his face, reaching out to hold onto his arms. When Zayn looks down he sees the tarnished silver of the moon-and-star ring on his fourth finger. He thinks of Harry’s PEACE ring on his own hand and thinks, _That’s exactly what you brought me. That’s exactly what you can give me_ , and knows that this is the right decision. “Oh, wow,” Harry says, softer this time. “You’re here. It’s you. I can’t believe you’re here. I heard your album.”

“Did you like it?” Zayn asks, arms moving up and around Harry’s neck. Their bodies fit together so well. He doesn’t know why he spent so long telling himself they didn’t. “It was about you.”

“Yeah. It was beautiful. I thought it might be. I thought – I don’t know what I thought,” Harry admits. His nose is sunburnt and peeling slightly. Zayn wants to press a light kiss to it. “I thought it might be a goodbye.”

“It wasn’t,” Zayn says, Harry wrapping his arms around his waist and pulling him in closer. “I just wanted to say how I felt.”

“Oh.” Harry presses his lips together, dimples visible. “Well. Good. It’s taken you a while.”

“I’m here now, aren’t I?” Zayn says, his voice rougher than he intended, just like it always is. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to change that, but he’ll try. He’ll try a lot of things to make Harry happy.

“You are.” Harry lets go of him, and smiles a bit. “You are. And it’s really nice.”

Nice. That stupid word again. Somehow it makes Zayn like Harry even more than before. The way he lives his life: doing his best to be kind to people, even if it’s only for an irritatingly transient moment. Being nice, even though sometimes it’s in a way that doesn’t ring true to Zayn. It can’t hurt anyone, though, that’s the thing. Zayn needs to find some sort of balance between being nice and being truthful, but it feels easier here in Harry’s back garden, beneath the bright sky with fresh grass under his feet and Harry’s gaze on him, thoughtful and still a little wary.

“I think I loved you,” Zayn says quickly, and Harry’s eyes widen. “Back then. I got freaked out and I thought you didn’t give a shit and Perrie definitely did like me so I thought she’d be safest. But trying to play it safe, that’s no fucking fun, is it?”

“No.” Harry shakes his head slowly, and reaches out to take Zayn’s hands. “It isn’t. And now?”

“Well.” Zayn exhales a bit, trying to work everything out in his head. God, he had a million hour plane journey before this. He should definitely have written himself a script. “The reason I didn’t marry Perrie was that we didn’t love each other enough, but then in Vegas I did want to marry you, even though I was totally off my face – and I wasn’t totally miserable about it the next morning either. There was something that felt right about being with you. I felt quiet and happy in my heart. And it’s like…” He exhales, trying to find the words, and God, it’s hard, it’s so fucking hard, but there’s no point in anything else now he’s here. It’s the only thing that matters. “I think it was there the whole time underneath everything else, I just – I don’t think I knew how to access it.”

“Oh.” Harry frowns a little and looks down at their hands. “That makes sense, I think.”

“Harry, I am still so fucking in love with you,” Zayn says. The words are out before he even realises they’re coming, and he feels himself flush, but it’s okay. It’s fine, because Harry’s face is creasing into a smile, eyes crinkling in that ridiculous, sweet, infectious way that he’s always had, and Zayn’s chest is hurting with how much he likes him and how much affection he holds for him. He wants to know Harry better, and love him well, and make him feel safe and happy. He doesn’t know how to go about doing that, but he feels like the fact he wants to try for the first time in his life is a good start.

“Finally,” Harry says, clearly trying to sound flippant, but it comes out on a bit of a tremble that just makes Zayn love him even more.

“You’re such a dick,” he says, and drags Harry down to kiss him. Harry half laughs against his mouth, transparently happy, before kissing Zayn harder and pulling him closer, and Zayn feels like he might be about to take off and fly. He’s felt that a few times in his life, the urge to escape and to be by himself, and he doesn’t doubt he’ll feel it in the future too. It’s just that now he knows where he’ll be coming back to.

*

Harry makes him terrible American tea that Zayn complains vociferously about, and then Harry rolls his eyes and shuts him up by pressing him against the breakfast bar in the kitchen and kissing him slowly. They make nachos and drink beers and swim in Harry’s pool on full stomachs because they’re wild rebels. Zayn floats like he did in the sea in Ibiza, staring up at the sky as Harry sails around on a lilo. Even though there’s no salt, the water’s stiller here than the ocean and it’s easier to trust it to carry him. 

The day cools and they get out of the pool and Harry retrieves towels for them, running inside his house with the wet soles of his feet slapping against tiles and his beautiful carpet, shaking out his hair like a dog as he comes outside again. He still looks like he’s got the sun shining out of his skin after all this time. They dry off and sit by the edge of the pool to watch the sun set, feet in the water, towels wrapped around their waists. Zayn’s a slightly uncomfortable mixture of dripping and damp, but he doesn’t mind. 

The early evening is beautiful here. The air is still and warm, and Zayn can hear birds chirping somewhere nearby. A faint breeze ruffles through the bushes and Zayn catches the far-off scent of some sweet flower. The water is cool on his feet, the sound of it lapping against the sides of the pool gentle and constant, and the sun is starting to fade, pale red and orange starting to streak their way through the sky. After a moment Harry asks, “What now?”

Zayn sighs a little, not unhappily. “I don’t know,” he says, and pulls Harry’s hand into his lap, running his fingertips gently over the back of Harry’s hand, his knuckles, the little cross tattoo between his thumb and finger. There’s a lot to think about. There are newspapers and fans and friends and families, but right now there’s only each other. He lifts Harry’s hand to his mouth and kisses his fingers, close to the ring Zayn gave him that Harry never took off. This is a beginning and an ending. This is home. “But we’ve got plenty of time to decide.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to the mod for setting this up and thank you so much to everyone who has left comments and kudos so far! My tumblr is [flomps](http://flomps.tumblr.com) and my twitter is [foracorkscrew](https://twitter.com/foracorkscrew) and I LOVE talking to people so come and say hi! 
> 
> Also, an extremely short prequel can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4793729).


End file.
